This is the Daytona 500 from the Sky: A multi-part series from For The Win looking at NASCAR’s biggest race of the year from an aerial perspective.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The Daytona 500 is chaos. Cars careen into each other frequently. Last year, 21 of 40 cars were collected in a giant wreck with just a few laps remaining. The No. 1 factor in whether a driver makes it out clean? A spotter giving him direction through an earpiece based on what he sees from his perch high above Daytona International Speedway.
During the first and biggest race on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule, 40 spotters, one for each entered team, are crammed onto an elevated platform on the roof of the tower, which includes the press box and suites below and hovers over the track’s frontstretch grandstands. The spotters stand isn’t particularly wide, and each spotter only has a couple feet of space to occupy as they’re looking down at the iconic 2.5-mile race track.
They’re armed with binoculars, water, sunscreen, four radios and several spare batteries just in case — Chase Elliott’s spotter, Eddie D’Hondt, even had a sandwich bag filled with throat lozenges Saturday — the spotters’ job at Daytona is simple, in theory: Communicate constantly with the drivers, keep them safe and give your team a chance to win by surviving the all-but-guaranteed carnage.
At one of NASCAR’s longest tracks, the cars draft off each other, racing inches apart and capitalizing on their own momentum or stealing someone else’s. Because of the draft, spotters and drivers agreed the superspeedways — like Daytona, Talladega Superspeedway and Pocono Raceway — are where the spotters are the most crucial. Over their team radios, they’re throwing as much valuable information as they can at the driver — though careful not to talk just to talk — while guiding the car to the lane with the most momentum and keeping it out of trouble.
“[The] spotter is very important at the [superspeedway] races because you can’t see everything that you want to see,” defending Cup Series champion Kyle Busch said. “In a perfect world, if you could drive the race car from outside the back of the car like you can on a video game, that’s where you want to be.”
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The spotters are talking almost constantly, describing as many observations as they can to aid the driver’s decision-making. It’s a wide range, like who’s going two- or three- wide and where, who’s about to push you, who’s making a move, when to throw a block, when they’ve cleared a car, who’s about to wreck, who’s already wrecking and where to go to avoid it.
Seamless communication could be the difference between avoiding a crash by inches or getting your race car towed off the track. Trust between a driver and spotter is critical too because, as defending Daytona 500 champ Denny Hamlin explained, “I do not have time to check to make sure what my spotter is telling me is true.”
Sometimes, even a team’s crew chief will tell the spotter to relay a message about strategy or the car’s handling to the driver instead of jumping on the radio and saying it himself for the sake of continuity.
Similar to the NASCAR saying about superspeedway masters “seeing” the flow of the air, the spotters feel like they can see and sense momentum shifts. But there’s still plenty of luck involved at Daytona, so it’s not everyone’s favorite track.
“Ultimately, it all comes down to the racing gods,” Tony Hirschman, Busch’s spotter, said. “When they’re all wrecking around you, they’re either going to wreck into your lane or wreck away from you, so fingers crossed that you can maybe try to skate on through.”
TJ Majors — who’s entering his 16th full-time Cup Series season and was previously Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s spotter — said he could even look at a random photo or video and identify which car has momentum or is about to make a move.
“I’d keep saying to [Majors] before every race at Daytona: ‘Just remember, TJ, just paint the picture,’” said Earnhardt, who won two Daytona 500s. “I wanted him to feel like I never needed to look in the mirror out of curiosity, and I could always focus on what’s going on in front of me.”
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Although everyone wants their team to be the last one standing in Victory Lane, working together is advantageous at a track like Daytona. Not only will teammates coordinate to draft with each other, but teams with the same manufacturer, Toyota, Ford or Chevrolet, will fall in line and draft together — at least until the end when it becomes every man for himself. Without a little teamwork, the physics of racing could leave them behind to fend for themselves.
There are also little in-race side deals spotters will sometimes negotiate with each other — like help on a late restart after a caution flag slows the field – but that game plan only works about 15 percent of the time, Hirschman guessed. Even if the spotter agrees to help out another team, perhaps the driver won’t or can’t, depending on how the moment plays out.
Coordinating outside of their teams isn’t exclusive to races either. Saturday during the final Daytona 500 practice, seven-time champion and No. 48 Chevrolet driver Jimmie Johnson’s spotter, Earl Barban, walked down the spotters stand asking, “Anyone drafting?”
To which Majors, who’s Joey Logano’s spotter for the No. 22 Ford team, replied with a laugh, “Not with you.”
Some ask another team’s spotter to work with them. Others are a little more direct. But it still doesn’t always work out if the drivers aren’t on board or don’t execute properly.
“I don’t ask; I tell,” D’Hondt said. “I’m one of the senior guys up there, so we get a lot of respect. So if I go and tell them something, it’s not really asking.
“And they’re respected too because I’ll get told also, ‘Hey, this is what I’m doing. I need your help.’ We get it. We’re up there 12, 14 hours a day, three days a week. We know everything about each other.”
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They spend that much time together because most spotters work the Cup Series, XFINITY Series and Truck Series. Some even do ARCA races and other lower-tiered events too.
“If you don’t [work the three national series], there’s something wrong with you,” said D’Hondt, who’s entering his 18th year in the Cup Series but has never won the Daytona 500.
Between practices for some series in the morning and races later in the day, spotters can be up on the unshaded stand for hours on hours. Some go up there with coolers with sandwiches, snacks and drinks, while Hirschman even has a folding chair he brings up there to help him “work smarter, not harder” and relax briefly during breaks.
They each spot from the same place on the roof for each race, and it doesn’t change when they switch teams, Majors explained, because they’re all so used to their specific sight lines on the track.
The car numbers are written on the railing overlooking the track, sometimes along with their names and minimal notes jotted down on masking tape. Hirschman has “CHAMP18N” written next to his name after Busch’s No. 18 Toyota team won it all last season.
The spotters spend significantly more time on the roof of the tower with each other than they do with their own teams, and their schedules often line up together more than with their own team’s crew. Many of them have spent 38 race weekends on roofs at race tracks for years together, if not decades, so they become friends when they’re not competitors.
Hirschman said he and Kevin Hamlin, Alex Bowman’s spotter with the No. 88 Chevrolet, are huge Duke fans and went out to dinner and watched the Blue Devils beat UNC the night before the Busch Clash, last weekend’s exhibition race at Daytona. Majors described himself as the class clown in between physically poking Chris Osborne, John Hunter Nemechek’s No. 38 Ford, during Saturday’s Cup practice.
“It’s like going to school,” Majors said. “Every year, you might have one or two new kids but for the most part, it’s the same group. … And it’s like we all have assigned seats because we go to the same spot that we’ve been spotting in for years.”
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Being friends outside of work is great, but that doesn’t prevent plenty of in-race conflicts between spotters when there’s drama on the track.
At the 75-lap Clash last Sunday, Logano and Busch ignited a late wreck, and the finger pointing began. Frustrated, Busch described what appeared to be Logano blocking multiple times as “a few bad decisions,” while the No. 22 Ford driver brushed it off and said he thought he did “a good job blocking.”
As it turns out, their spotters were having the same debate — though it was a bit more intense and with each other, rather than through the media — up on the spotters stand.
Hirschman, Busch’s spotter, stands feet away from Majors, Logano’s spotter, on the spotters stand, and he said he only yelled at Majors “a little bit” after the crash took out Busch’s No. 18 Toyota but not the No. 22.
“I told him, ‘If you want to come down here and talk about Old Bay, then we’ll talk about that,’” Majors recalled, saying Hirschman puts the seasoning on everything.
“‘But until then, go back down to your spot!’ He started laughing a little bit for a second, then he got mad again.”
At the Daytona track, spotters are packed fairly close to each other, so although Hirshman and Majors’ fiery exchange wasn’t public, it also wasn’t private.
“Oh, it got pretty heated,” said D’Hondt, who’s stands immediately to the left of Majors and four places to the right of Hirschman. “I was right in the middle of it. TJ’s on one side of me, Tony’s two over on the other side, so I was like the bologna in the sandwich.”
Understandably, both Majors and Hirschman defended their respective drivers. Plus, seeing the wreck unfold only in real time, it’s easy to assume the other spotter and driver are 100 percent wrong.
Days later, they were able to tease each other about it and let go of the blame, agreeing physics may have played the largest role in the wreck with Logano blocking Busch and getting loose, which led to Busch making contact with Logano’s car. But that’s much harder to recognize in the heat of the moment.
“You’ll have three or four different versions of a wreck,” Hirshman said. “You race enough and you’re competitive enough, there’s no angels out there. You’re going to have incidents, and everybody’s take on those vary.”
Stuck in the middle, D’Hondt said when these things happen, it’s best to let the spotters “hash it out” and try not to let it get physical.
“There have been a few physical confrontations, but they’re few and far between,” said Hirschman, who’s entering his ninth season spotting for Busch.
And they don’t take it personally, so it’s easy to let go and resume their friendship when the day is over.
“We’re not driving the cars,” Majors said. “I didn’t turn the wheel, and I know [Hirschman] didn’t work the gas and brake pedal of the car. He didn’t personally drive into us or whatever it was.”
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To win the Daytona 500, everyone on the team has to perform nearly flawlessly, and even then, sometimes that’s not enough if the driver happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting collected in a massive wreck kicked off by someone else’s mistake. Communication from spotter to driver doesn’t just need to be constant, but it also needs to be precise and clear.
“Everything has to be perfect,” Logano said. “And perfect means that you can still get caught up in something, obviously, out there. But the way you recover from it you need to be perfect.”
Spotters can’t predict every move, they can’t sense every ounce of momentum and, despite their high-tech binoculars, they don’t have a clear view of some parts of the 2.5-mile track. They’ll make mistakes just like drivers and hope an error doesn’t lead to a destroyed race car headed toward the garage. And if a screw-up hurts someone else, the best thing a spotter can do is find the aggrieved spotter up there and apologize.
“I can respect a guy that comes down there and says, ‘Hey, I messed up,’” Majors said.
“You can be mad and disappointed, but what are you going to do? You can’t change it now, so the quicker you can rebound and get yourself in your happy shoes, the better you’ll be.”
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