Duel 150 Qualifying Races Were Recon Mission

BY ESPN

Perhaps you thought Thursday night's Duel 150 qualifying races were what they claim to be, a pair of events to set the field for the Daytona 500. And yes, they were.

You likely believed that they were feel-good stories about guys like Corey LaJoie, always searching for a break, and D.J. Kennington, only the eighth Canadian to make the Great American Race, racing their way into the big show. And sure, that was great.

But the real purpose of the two 21-car events? It was a recon mission.

"I feel like really one of the biggest things I picked on is who the players were tonight, who is going to be good on Sunday [in the Daytona 500], what cars to look out for," said Chase Elliott, who'd just earned the first points-paying victory of his Cup Series career. Yet that wasn't what he was talking about. "I learned a couple of things I'm going to keep in the back of my mind."

Incessant rains (you'll have that, it is Florida after all) washed out what was supposed to be a day of pre-Duels drafting practice sessions. The Clash all-star event, pushed from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon (yes, by rain) included only 17 cars and five of those cars ended the day wrecked.

So Thursday night was the first legitimate chance to really see what these cars are going to do when the 59th Great American Race is run on Sunday. Compared to what will be a three-plus hour event with 40 cars, the Duels were merely a sampler. But considering there had been zero real data gathered before these races were run, it feels like a downright smorgasbord.

"It's obviously very circumstantial," Elliott continued. "It's going to change time to time as you come back to these plate races. Some guys are going to get better and some guys are going to fall off. ... I'm eager to get back and see how good these guys do."

Then he added, "I feel like Dale is going to be tough."

He was speaking of Dale Earnhardt Jr., his teammate who will join him on the front row Sunday but finished sixth behind winner Denny Hamlin in the second race.

Elliott was watching that second race on TV, just as Earnhardt was watching Elliott on TV during the first race.

"He's getting there, with experience," Earnhardt said of Elliott. "He's making moves he wouldn't have made just one year ago."

Earnhardt also talked about Austin Dillon, who pushed Hamlin to the win in the second race. Dillon was impressed with Clint Bowyer, who is now in retired Tony Stewart's car. Bowyer was curious about Denny Hamlin's ability to come from a pit-road penalty back to the front and was already willing to predict that the 2017 race will be much less of a same-manufacturer conga line contest as it was in 2016.

"Man, I hadn't run a single lap in the draft since we got down here to Daytona a week ago," Bowyer declared with relief. "I was watching everyone all the time and thinking, 'OK, file that away.' "

"It is constant note-taking," explained Hamlin. "We had to operate on a lot of assumptions coming into tonight because we didn't really have anything to go on. Now we do. Everyone said you couldn't use the bottom line. If you had to write your Daytona 500 preview story this morning you would have written that.

"Well, if tonight you watched me or you watched Dale Junior or you watched Jamie McMurray or Chase in that first race, you wouldn't write that now, would you? Same for us."

The recon gathered in the Duels was far from a complete picture of what Sunday will be. They've run qualifying races before the Daytona 500 since the first Speedweeks in 1959 and they've never been a fully accurate crystal ball.

But what we have now is a heckuva lot more than what we had before.

"We've got game film now," said Dillon, football fan. "And at midnight tonight if you go knocking on the doors of any driver or a crew chief's motorcoach, that's what they'll be watching."