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Thursday night’s first Can-Am Duel was an exhibition of pure power, Dale Earnhardt Jr. swatting away all challengers with ease. The second Duel was a 200-mph freight train, Kyle Busch, Matt Kenseth, and Jimmie Johnson proceeding through 59 and one-fourth laps until a multi-car collision took out several of the biggest names in the field: Kenseth, Johnson and 2015 championship four member Martin Truex Jr., as well as Kurt Busch, AJ Allmendinger and Danica Patrick.
Several will need to go to backup cars, and that’s where things get a touch tricky. As Earnhardt demonstrated earlier in the night, having the right car at Daytona is like having the right guitar at Wembley: it just feels perfect. So switching to a backup can mean bidding farewell to a rocket, and Kenseth, Truex, Johnson and Allmendinger will have to do just that, starting in the back of the field in new rides.
“I don’t know if starting in the back is as bad as losing your car,” Kenseth said. “That was our second car [wrecked] this week. We’re down to our third-string car.”
“It’s a shame,” Truex said. “It’s two cars [wrecked] on the last lap in two races in Turn 1, so a little bit frustrating.”
Granted, switching from one car to another isn’t always a huge issue. “All these cars are built pretty close,” said Kyle Busch, winner of the second duel after his best competitors got caught up in that final-lap wreck. “There’s a lot of sister cars and things like that that they build two, three, four at a time, right back-to-back. They’re all the same sequence and chassis numbers. The way we do our seats nowadays with the port inserts, they’re very repeatable.”
Busch noted that the drivers switching to a backup did have at least one advantage: “Just being able to go out there and have the opportunity to hit the race track one more time, that’s really good for everybody,” he said. “If it was the last lap of practice on Saturday and you had to start the race on Sunday with no laps on it, that’s a lot tougher.”
“Just sad that we wasted that car for no reason,” Allmendinger said. “Starting from the back here doesn’t mean anything. … We’re going to have to go to work on that backup car.”
“Starting at the back, when it’s 500 miles … if you can’t get to the front in three-and-a-half, four hours,” Kenseth said, “you have an issue.”
“It’s disappointing,” Allmendinger said, then added, through a clenched-teeth grin, “but it’s Daytona. That’s why I love. It. So. Much.”
Podcast: Q&A with EARNHARDT NATION author Jay Busbee:
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.