10 Reasons We Can't Wait for the 2015 NASCAR Season to Begin
The wait is nearly over, race fans.
The Daytona 500 is under two weeks away, and that means the beginning of another quest for the Sprint Cup for the few dozen drivers lucky enough to have a full-time ride on NASCAR's top-tier circuit.
From the Great American Race to the Chase for the Sprint Cup, there are plenty of reasons to be excited for the season ahead.
What impact will the new rules have on competition?
Can Jimmie Johnson complete his run toward history?
And how will one of motorsports' legends go out in his final season?
These are the 10 reasons we can't wait for the 2015 NASCAR season to begin.
The Great American Race
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We’re under two weeks from the Daytona 500.
The Great American Race is the showcase event of the NASCAR season, the first meaningful laps at an iconic track that places us on the long, winding road toward crowning the next Sprint Cup champion.
The Super Bowl of races has been known to produce its share of surprises in the past, such as when Trevor Bayne, in only his second Sprint Cup start, captured the checkered flag in 2011.
Bayne will try to become a repeat champion when the green flag waves at Daytona International Raceway Feb. 22, but he’ll need to overcome a talented field, all looking to get their seasons off on the right foot.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. won this race last season, his emotional second victory in the 500 on the same track that claimed his father’s life, and that led him to his best season in a decade.
That’s the type of momentum that a win at Daytona can build, and it’s just days away.
Saying Goodbye to a Legend
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Jeff Gordon announced in late January that 2015 would be his last season behind the wheel of a race car on NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series. The decision to retire doesn’t come as much of a surprise—he’ll turn 44 years old in August and speculation has been around for a while—but it will be a big loss for the sport.
Gordon and the No. 24 car have been iconic fixtures in the sport for as long as you can remember.
He’s a four-time Sprint Cup champion—most recently in 2001—and won four times last season before controversially being eliminated from the Chase after the penultimate race at Phoenix.
Gordon came up just short of a chance to compete for a fifth championship at Homestead, but he figures to contend again in his final season.
Make no mistake, this isn’t just a swan-song year.
It’s not a victory lap for a guy who hung on too long or isn’t a factor anymore.
Gordon could well go out a winner.
He's still got it.
Saying Hello to a Prodigy
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Gordon might be riding off into the sunset, but his successor has already been anointed.
Chase Elliott, the 2014 Nationwide Series champion, will replace Gordon at season’s end in the No. 24 car. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a 19-year-old driver who won’t even say goodbye to his teenage years until after the Sprint Cup season concludes.
He won’t be a full-time driver until the 2016 season, but Elliott will race a part-time schedule as part of Hendrick Motorsports’ team this year in order to acclimate to the rigors of NASCAR’s top-tier circuit.
We don’t yet know when and where he’ll make his debut, but the way he absolutely blew through Nationwide last year—locking up the championship before the season finale—makes his impending debut all the more interesting and anticipated.
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Jimmie Johnson Pursues a Record-Tying Seventh Sprint Cup
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Jimmie Johnson’s early elimination from last season’s Chase zapped a bit of drama from the newly redone competition to crown the season’s champion.
A chance at history would have to wait another year.
Johnson will look to use his early exit—when was the last time he raced just for racing’s sake—as motivation when his pursuit of NASCAR history begins again at Daytona in just a few days.
His five straight championships between 2006-2010 are a record, and his win in 2013 placed him one title away from joining the Mount Rushmore of NASCAR drivers with Richard Petty and the late Dale Earnhardt.
The King and the Intimidator each won seven championships, a feat many expected the driver of the 48 car to match in 2015. His elimination with four races remaining in the season was one of the biggest storylines of the year.
Johnson had his chance to stay alive, leading the most laps at the Geico 500 at Talladega before a 24th-place finish left him on the outside looking in before the Eliminator Round got underway.
Will the second time be a charm in 2015?
Or will Johnson come up short again in his quest for a seventh title?
New Rules
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Expect some closer races and more dramatic finishes in the season ahead.
NASCAR’s new rules package, which was introduced for the 2015 season, basically guarantees that more cars will remain in the mix for longer during races. That’s a part of the overall trend aimed at maximizing drama from race to race and maintaining fan interest.
Sprint Cup cars will see a reduction in horsepower from 850 to 750hp, which represents a nearly one-eighth drop in the amount of power under the hood from last season.
That’s a pretty drastic fall, which will be somewhat compensated for by a shorter rear spoiler, and it will likely lead to more competitive Saturdays and Sundays at the race track.
Private testing of cars will also be banned, forcing teams to rely more on computer models and limited testing opportunities presented by NASCAR.
So what’s ahead for drivers and fans?
We obviously won’t know until we see it on the track, but the goal is greater competition.
NASCAR's Most Popular Pursues a Championship with a New Chief
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Junior's four trips to Victory Lane in 2014 matched his win total from the previous nine seasons combined.
Allow that to sink in for just a moment.
Things didn't go quite as well for NASCAR's most popular driver once the Chase arrived—although one of those wins came after he was eliminated from title contention—and Junior will have a new face calling the shots from his pit box once racing commences this season.
Steve LeTarte is out—taking an analyst job for NBC Sports—and he'll be replaced by Greg Ives.
Ives has a long history with both Junior and Hendrick Motorsports. And he has a championship pedigree now, helping lead Elliott to a dominant Nationwide Series title last season.
With Gordon's impending retirement, the clock has begun to tick somewhat on Junior. He's popular, personable and has a legendary last name, but the chances to etch his name on the Sprint Cup could be running out.
Will Ives and his new approach, combined with familiarity with his driver and garage, do the trick?
We should know relatively soon.
The Future of Stewart-Haas Racing
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Stewart-Haas Racing's season was mostly a complete and utter disaster despite one important fact.
Kevin Harvick, in his first season on the team after better than a decade with Richard Childress Racing, lifted the Sprint Cup with a win at Homestead in November to wrap up a year marred by tragedy and disappointment.
Team co-owner Tony Stewart, himself a three-time champion, made it back-to-back years without qualifying for the Chase, and that wasn't even close to the worst thing that happened to him last year.
Already recovering from a badly broken leg suffered in a race the previous year, Stewart was involved in a fatal incident in upstate New York over the summer that claimed the life of driver Kevin Ward Jr. A grand jury later cleared him of any wrongdoing, but he wasn't the same. You can fairly wonder whether he ever will be.
Kurt Busch, another high-profile addition to the team before last year, didn't do much in the way of justifying that investment, finishing 30th or worse in 10 races.
The final cog in the SHR team is Danica Patrick, and while she put together her best season as a Sprint Cup driver, she seemed to have some momentum zapped with a crew-chief change near the end of the Chase.
Harvick should remain a title contender, but there are real questions about Stewart, Busch and Patrick.
The Unexpected Winner
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It seems to happen every year.
There's that one race, that one Sunday afternoon, where something absolutely crazy happens.
A big wreck, a bad pit stop, a late caution, and all of the sudden you see a driver pull into Victory Lane that almost nobody expected, even if you couldn't help but root for him.
A.J. Allmendinger had plenty of firsts on one August afternoon at The Glen.
'Dinger won his first Sprint Cup race on the road course, securing passage into the Chase for the first time and the first win for the single-car JTG Daugherty Racing team.
What can you say?
Allmendinger is well-liked in NASCAR circles among owners, crews and his fellow drivers, and his victory was well-received.
You can almost guarantee that someone will emerge with a similarly unlikely but well-deserved victory this year.
Especially with the new rules meant to increase competition.
Who will it be?
Danica Patrick'S Chance at History
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Year 3 of the Danica Patrick experiment is about to commence.
Yes, she's polarizing.
Some NASCAR fans love her for breaking barriers—first woman to win the pole and lead a lap at the Daytona 500—but others view her as a carefully managed marketing ploy.
The proper lens with which to view her career, at least thus far, is somewhere in the middle.
Patrick has been a fairly middle-of-the-road driver over the course of her Sprint Cup career. She's not in the top tier, but she's not scraping the bottom of the barrel either. Her presence definitely helps to draw in new fans, and her ability to compete in a sport traditionally dominated by men is inspiring.
The biggest question is: Can she win?
Tricky business—but always one of the most exciting things about the start of NASCAR season.
Patrick has shown slow, but steady, improvement in each of her full-time campaigns. Her average finishing position jumped from 24th to 22nd last year, and her sixth-place finish at Atlanta was the best of her career.
Will she win?
Maybe.
Can she win?
Definitely, and if she does, she'll make history.
The Drama of Homestead
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You can love or hate the new Chase format, but you'd better get used to it.
NASCAR hit one out of the park last season by introducing elimination stages, points resets and a winner-take-all finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Harvick, Ryan Newman, Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano all came to Homestead with a chance to lift the Sprint Cup, and the result was very much in doubt up until the moment Harvick crossed the finish line to win his first title.
But the dramatics didn't begin there.
You heard it on a weekly basis from drivers, fans and basically everyone involved in the sport. The new format upped the dramatics and it upped the intensity both on and off the track.
Sure, there will be purists out there who don't like this or that—and you will have a real gripe if someone ends up winning the Sprint Cup without winning a race, like almost happened with Newman last year—but the overall impressions were good.
It was a success, and more than anything, we can't wait for it to start again.
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