Dale Earnhardt Jr. led the final ‘happy hour’ practice at Daytona International Speedway Saturday as teams got their final laps in prior to Sunday’s Daytona 500.
The ninety minute session was calm as drivers made careful laps in order to avoid disaster. In fact most teams ran no more than 10 laps with only 5 teams running more then 20 laps. Earnhardt’s speed of 198.592 came in a drafting pack early in the session. Nine teams elected to sit out the session including Jeff Gordon who will start from the front row on Sunday.
“I think the more accidents you see earlier in the week, the less people want to practice the day before the Daytona 500,” Gordon said. “I feel like we, for us, all I can speak for is us, we've had a good week. I think we learned a lot in the 150 (Duel Qualifying Race), and we just need to fine tune. We were able to do that yesterday, so we don't really reason. If there was something that popped up that we wanted to try and do, then we'd be out there today.”
Reigning Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski was one of the few drivers to run more than 20 laps.
“If I had it my way we would run every day, every lap, every pack – go,” Keselowski said. “You can’t win these races scared. You have to go out there and put it all out on the line. That is what I would do if I had the choice. Now obviously there is a lot of work that goes into it. When you are the guys that work on the cars they can probably be a little more prepared if I give them some time off to work on it. You have to kind of balance that and that is why you have a crew chief because he can balance it for me.”
There were no incidents in the session.
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