Yahoo Autos This Is the Race We Finally See NASCAR's 2021 Balance of Power
NASCAR Cup Series - Homestead-Miami Speedway
Sunday, February 28th - 3:30 p.m. ET - FOX - Streaming On FOX Apps
Once again, NASCAR is the only major series racing on US television. After two weekends of outliers, first a plate race on the Daytona oval and then a road course race in the Daytona infield, NASCAR finally gets to the standard, intermediate ovals that make up the majority of the schedule.
For years, Homestead-Miami Speedway was once the home of the championship-deciding season finale. Its unique shape, with tighter corners and no trioval, made it among the best tracks the series ran, but the 550 horsepower/high downforce package the series has committed to on intermediate ovals severely worsened the racing both here and at the similarly-unique Darlington Raceway over the past few years. NASCAR chose to remedy that for Darlington, but have chosen not to make any changes at Homestead.
While that decision is certainly disappointing, it makes this race a very interesting litmus test for the rest of the season. This race may look quite a lot like last year's Kansas race, where Joey Logano was able to simply hold his line and effortlessly hold off a challenge from a faster Kevin Harvick, and that is certainly not the basis of a good on-track product. However, that race actually played a significant part in deciding the championship. A win would have locked Kevin Harvick, the winningest driver in the Cup Series that year, into the Championship Four. Instead, his season ended in disappointment a week early.
The 2021 NASCAR schedule has been touted everywhere as a radical change for the better, but the series still ends with a run of many of these low horsepower, high downforce races on intermediate tracks. After two races that have obscured the season's balance-of-power behind the chaos of pack racing and the unique rules of road course racing, this will mark the first chance teams have to compare themselves against their opponents in the type of races that will actually decide who will win this year's Cup Series championship. It was an intermediate race that kept Kevin Harvick from locking himself into the finale early, and it may well be an intermediate race that helps decide the championship this year, too.
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