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SPORTS A21
NASCAR’S biggest losers hopeful of major upset at Daytona
DAN GELSTON
AP Sports Writer
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP)
— The 1962 New York Mets,
the mid-70s Tampa Bay
Bucs and the current Phila-
delphia 76ers have nothing
on Casey Mears.
The nephew of four-time
Indianapolis 500 champion
Rick Mears, Casey has a
tortured losing streak that
is closing in on 300 races.
His chances of winning the
Daytona 500 on Sunday are
about as slim as the gap
between cars in bumper-
to-bumper pack racing.
“I don’t like the stat that I are over. Cars owned by
have, the longest-running
winless streak,” Mears said.
“But I think a lot of those
things drive you to push
and work hard now to try to
end that.”
Don’t worry Mears, you ac-
tually don’t have the lon-
gest streak.
According to STATS LLC,
the longest active losing
streaks in the Sprint Cup se-
ries by drivers attempting
this year’s Daytona 500 are
held by:
— Bobby Labonte, 395 rac-
es.
— David Gilliland, 330 rac-
es.
— Mears, 296 races.
— Reed Sorenson, 234 rac-
es.
— Michael Waltrip, 218 rac-
es.
Those are just a few of the
of forlorn drivers who will
trudge into “The Great
American Race” without
much expectation of pull-
ing off The Big One and
adding to the short list of
upsets at Daytona Interna-
tional Speedway.
With few exceptions, the
majority of the long shots
Casey Mears drives down pit road before going out on the track during a practice session for the NASCAR Sprint Unlimited auto race
at Daytona International Speedway, Friday, Feb. 12, 2016, in Daytona Beach, Fla.
are on the wrong side of
NASCAR’s power structure.
They drive low-funded cars
with inferior equipment and
have inexperienced crews
that put them in the hole
before the green flag even
drops.
The days of an underdog
like Alan Kulwicki scratch-
ing together the resources
to win a championship,
much less multiple races,
Roger Penske, Rick Hen-
drick, Stewart-Haas and
Joe Gibbs won 35 of the 36
Cup points races last sea-
son. Martin Truex Jr. was the the way it works with my-
lone outlier, winning once
for Furniture Row Racing.
For some drivers, the
thought of starting the en-
gine knowing there was no
chance of catching Jim-
mie and Junior — or even
winless Danica — was a
blow to their pride.
Justin Allgaier went 0 for 75
in three years at the Cup
level before dropping to
the second-tier Xfinity Se-
ries.
“I saw a side of myself that
I didn’t necessarily like,” he
said. “I started doing some
things with the way I ap-
proached the track, and
I didn’t like the way I was
doing that. I’ve struggled
to understand why it works
self.”
Greg Biffle was once one of
NASCAR’s regular winners,
getting to victory lane six
times in 2005 and finishing
fifth in the standings in 2012. era of early exits has largely
He’s coming off back-to-
back winless seasons for
the first time in his Cup ca-
reer.
“Last year, unfortunately,
we knew that next month
we weren’t going to show
up to the race track and
win,” he said. “We didn’t
have the cars to do it.”
Mired in mediocrity, Biffle’s
team underwent a major
offseason overhaul that in-
Thursday 18 February 2016
cluded a new crew chief to
try and rediscover his win-
ning ways.
Mears has watched Ger-
main Racing morph
through the years into a po-
tentially competitive team
and he flashed some speed
in Daytona qualifying. He
had heavyweight owner-
ship behind him early in his
career before he bounced
around with the have-nots.
He failed to qualify for the
2010 Daytona 500 driving
for a start-and-park team.
The start-and-park teams
were NASCAR’s equivalent
of tanking, fielding a non-
competitive car in hopes
of guaranteed cash and
little risk of destroying parts. “I used to say it’s a crap-
With a new charter system
in place, that ignominious
been drummed out of the
series.
“It’s the worst thing you’ve
ever done as a competi-
tor,” Mears said. “I don’t
know how you do it, but
you have to because you
want to continue to be in
the sport.”
But much like that 2-15
matchup in the NCAA
Tournament, there is still
a glimmer that — on any
Associated Press
given Sunday at Daytona
— there is hope.
Waltrip went 462 races with-
out a victory before win-
ning the 2001 Daytona 500.
Trevor Bayne, driving in this
year’s field, pulled one of
NASCAR’s biggest stunners
at Daytona in 2011. Derrike
Cope — who? — won the
1990 Daytona 500.
They all have more Dayto-
na 500 victories than three-
time series champion Tony
Stewart. Dale Earnhardt
won just once before he
died in the 2001 race.
But Daytona is largely a
race for the big boys. There
are nine former winners in
the 40-car field.
shoot. It just isn’t,” Sprint Un-
limited winner Denny Ham-
lin said. “The same guys
don’t win all the time if it’s a
crapshoot. I think that guys
like Dale Junior that contin-
ually put themselves up at
the front when it counts at
these superspeedway rac-
es, it’s because he knows
something that the rest of
the field does not. Those
are the guys that you need
to look at and figure out
how you can get better to
get to their level.”q