NASCAR: At least this race won’t take 78 days to finish
By Asher Fair
Texas Motor Speedway has seen races postponed before. In fact, not too long ago, one race took a whopping 78 days to complete.
Rain on NASCAR Cup Series race days isn’t uncommon. It has happened many times this season, although the rain on Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway during the round of 8 playoff race, the Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 500, caused the first postponement in more than four months.
The season-opening Daytona 500 was started on Sunday, February 16 and finished on Monday, February 17 due to rain at Daytona International Speedway, and the scheduled race at Talladega Superspeedway for Sunday, June 21 ended up being run on Monday, June 22 for the same reason.
Sunday’s 334-lap race around the four-turn, 1.5-mile (2.414-kilometer) oval in Fort Worth, Texas did ended up getting underway as planned, but only 52 laps had been completed by the time the rains came and the red flag flew.
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The race was initially postponed to Monday since it had not yet reached the halfway mark and thus could not be deemed official, but there was no point throughout the day during which the weather and track were good for racing. So it was further postponed to Tuesday.
Now here we are: day three of the 2020 Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 500. And given the current weather forecast for Fort Worth, we may not be done yet. In fact, we may not be done tomorrow, either, and keep in mind, there is another race on Sunday, November 1 on the schedule at Martinsville Speedway, the third and final race of the round of 8 and the penultimate race of the 36-race season.
However, we can all take solace in the fact that at least this race won’t be a 78-day race like another recent event at the track.
Back on Saturday, June 11, 2016, IndyCar was scheduled to run its annual race at the track. Once again, rain prevented that from happening. On day two, Sunday, June 12, the race was able to get underway, but after 71 of 248 laps, the rains came and the red flag flew.
The race had not yet reached the halfway mark and was therefore not official. But instead of coming back on day three, Sunday, June 13, IndyCar announced that the remaining 177 laps of the race would be run on day 78, Saturday, August 27 — 11 weeks after the race was initially scheduled.
Of course, that doesn’t seem so bizarre in 2020, given the fact that every racing schedule across the world has been massively overhauled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but considering that COVID-19 didn’t exist in 2016, a 78-day race caused by rain was, in fact, quite bizarre.
A total of five other IndyCar races, including one which was postponed by just one day due to rain, were contested between the start and finish of the 2016 Firestone 600 (or the 2016 Firestone 172/428, if you want to get technical).
So let’s keep this current NASCAR delay in perspective.
A 78-day race (77-day delay) takes us to Sunday, January 10, 2021. A five-race delay takes us to anywhere between Sunday, February 28, 2021 and Sunday, March 7, 2021.
So at least that’s not what we’re looking at here.
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As of now, NBC Sports Network is set to broadcast the remaining 282 laps of the 2020 Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 500 live from Texas Motor Speedway beginning at 12:00 p.m. ET this afternoon.