NASCAR chief reveals major hurdles in switching Clash to Daytona

NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer John Probst has outlined the hurdles the series would face if it wanted to switch the Clash to Daytona.

The season-opening exhibition race was scheduled to take place across Saturday and Sunday at Bowman Gray Stadium this weekend, but a winter storm forecast and the expectation of snow have already seen Saturday's action postponed.

Currently, NASCAR is planning to squeeze practice, qualifying, last chance qualifying and the race into Sunday, but everything is subject to the weather at this point.

One popular train of thought in the NASCAR community has been to switch the Clash back to Daytona International Speedway in the event that the weather prevents it from being held at Bowman Gray.

The Clash was previously held in Daytona from its inception in 1979 right through to 2021, after which it was switched to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

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NASCAR would struggle to switch Clash

However, at this stage, it doesn't sound like NASCAR finds that option very appealing, with Probst revealing some of the hurdles they would have to overcome in order to make it happen.

“Right now, the cars are configured for a short track with the new 750 horsepower engines, so if you say, ‘Let’s just pivot to Daytona’, you have two options,” Probst explained to SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

“You can say, let's run the oval [or] let's run the road course … You could say, ‘Well, we could run the 750 [horsepower] down there.

“The other thing is, the Great American Race, the Daytona 500’s coming up here real soon. Frank Kelleher and crew are down there getting that infield ready for campers … so that kind of rules out the road course once you figure we're getting ready for the Daytona 500 to actually start to move stuff in now."

Supply issue of engines a factor

Probst continued: “So then you're left with the oval. Once you go to the oval, now you're on the superspeedway engines, they need transaxles for that point.

“We race Daytona, we race Atlanta the week after, so there’s a pool of probably a hundred or more engines that are put aside right now in the engine shops for the 500 and Atlanta that follows up right the week after, so you run into a supply issue of engines to swap them out and basically no time notice, so that’s not really all that appealing.

“Then you look at the weather forecast in Orlando, Daytona area, that’s not spectacular either, they could be 20 degrees in Orlando this weekend, so there is certainly no shining oasis in the desert to say, ‘Well, let’s just go here’.”