Ken NASCAR has a painted box for each pit stall and their rules are that the car has to be pitted inside of the box, but due to the angle the cars has to enter the pit box sometimes they do allow the right rear tire of the car to be outside of the box but will penalize if any other part of the car is outside of the lines. On Thursday's qualifying races Dale Jr slid through his box and had to back up into the box before they could pit the car, on Sunday's 500 he completely missed his pit stall and had to go all of the way around the track to pit again and then later in the race he had both right side tires outside of the box but the crew went ahead and pitted the car and NASCAR penalized Dale Jr a 1 lap penalty ... in Jr's haste to get his lap back on the track he made a very aggressive move causing a multi-car wreck that cost at least three of the front running cars a chance at the win.
They can race in the dark at a Superspeedway, they have the lighting to do so but yesterday they said it would have probably been 11 p.m. before they could dry the track to race again and called it. They just started running the Daytona 500 later in the evening due to prime time TV coverage and my point is that if the race would have started earlier in the day like it used to it would have been finished before the rains cause it to be called. But I know mother nature is going to do what she wants to do on her time so my complaint is moot ... other than the fact that if the race started earlier in the day NASCAR wouldn't be so jumpy about calling it.
Calling a Daytona race is a peeve of mine through experience...
Years ago they ran the July 4th Daytona race at 10 in the morning so that they could get it in prior to the afternoon rain but moved it to a 8 p.m. start time to get the prime time coverage. My last two trips to the July race had both start times delayed by at least two hours due to rain so the race subsequently didn't end until after midnight and I didn't get back home until 4 and 5 in the morning, this happened two years in a row so I gave up my seats for Daytona and have not returned since.
