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Preamble: The title comes from a book by Robert Sheffield’s 2010 novel “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran.” In the novel, he takes 25 pop songs from the 1980s and uses each song as a jumping off point to talk about his love of music and growing up in the 1980s. (If you’re more into hair metal than pop, you should also check out Chuck Klosterman’s 2001 book “Fargo Rock City.”) In “Talking to People Who Don’t Know NASCAR About Daytona, I’m going to devote each entry in the series to one of my Top 10 favourite Daytona 500s. Instead of discussing who led what laps, etc. I’m going to describe to an audience (and probably a non-existence one) why I chose this particular race.
#10 – “The 2016 Daytona 500 – Canada’s best chance at a Daytona 500 win”
Mount Brydges, Ontario is the very definition of a small town. So small, Wikipedia doesn’t even give the town it’s own page, instead lumping it together as the municipality of Strathroy-Caradoc. In 2016, Statistics Canada declared it to have a population of 1,842.
But as the closing moments of that year’s Daytona 500 played out, Cole Pearn was about to put Mount Brydges on the NASCAR and, indeed, the sporting world’s map.
Although he was living in Denver, Colorado at the time of the race, Pearn had grown up in Mount Brydes, graduated from the University of Waterloo and raced throughout Southwestern Ontario, especially at Delaware Speedway.
By 2007, however, Pearn was working on the cars instead of racing them, as a car chief for Richard Childress Racing. Yes, Cole Pearn, a kid from Canada, was working for the same race team that Dale Earnhardt had won six championships with. He even served as the car chief for Kevin Harvick’s #29, whose lineage can be traced back to Earnhardt’s #3 team.
But Pearn wasn’t fated to become a household name by working at RCR. Instead, he headed to Denver, Colorado (of all places) to work for Furniture Row which then had an alliance with RCR. Pearn would reprise his role as a car chief for Furniture Row’s then-driver Kurt Busch. In 2014, Busch would leave and Martin Truex, Jr. would replace him as the driver for the #78 Chevrolet.
By 2014, Martin Truex, Jr. was far removed from his Busch – now Xfinity – Series Championship days. He had only two wins in the Cup Series and a controversial departure from Michael Waltrip Racing in 2013 left many wondering what the future held for Truex. His first year at Furniture Row wasn’t overly spectacular. Then, at the end of the year, crew chief Todd Berrier was released and Pearn was tabbed to be the new crew chief.
The pairing of Martin Truex, Jr. and Cole Pearn had the makings of one of the all-time great driver/crew chief teams. Between 2015 and 2019, Truex won 24 races, beginning with the 2015 Axalta “We Paint Winners” 400 at Pocono, making Pearn the first Canadian crew chief to win a Cup race since Gord McKichan led Earl Ross to victory at the 1974 Old Dominion 500 at Martinsville.
But that success was still largely ahead of the Truex/Pearn duo as the 2016 Daytona 500 rushed like a runaway locomotive towards the finish. Favourites Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Chase Elliott (on the pole in his first-ever Daytona 500 start) had been taken out in wrecks.
Even with restrictor plates in place, many a Daytona 500 has seen a finish by at least a car length. Not 2016. It was three wide, door-to-door racing with Truex, Denny Hamlin, Matt Kenseth, Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch all in contention.
As the pack came through the final turns, Matt Kenseth got loose and almost turned the runaway train into a train wreck. Instead, he slid up the racetrack and out of harms way but finishing 14th.
As they passed the entrance to pit road, it appeared Martin Truex, Jr. would win the Daytona 500 as he was mere inches ahead of Denny Hamlin. The small town of Mount Brydges, Ontario would be able to claim to be the home of a Daytona 500-winning crew chief.
But…it was not to be. Within mere feet – perhaps mere inches – from the start/finish line, Hamlin got the nose of his #11 Fedex Toyota ahead of Truex and would claim his first Daytona 500 victory by .01 (one one-hundredth) of a second. It would be the closest finish in Daytona 500 history.
Denny Hamlin wasn’t a surprise winner, really. He had always been strong at Daytona. In 2014, as Dale Earnhardt Jr. raced to his second Daytona 500 win, Hamlin had been right there. He had been perhaps the dominant car during that year’s Speedweeks, winning the second Duel qualifier, starting fourth in the 500 and was quickest in the fourth practice.
Hamlin would lead the early part of the race and finish second to Junior but you got a sense that someday he was going to win the Daytona 500. Two years later, on February 21, 2016, it was that day. He would go on to win two more Daytona 500s and is on the verge of three-peating something no driver, not even Richard Petty, has done.
Martin Truex, Jr. still waits for his first Daytona 500 win. For crew chief, Cole Pearn, that day looks to never come. After two dozen wins and a Cup championship with Martin Truex, Jr. in 2017, Cole Pearn departed the sport to run a ski lodge in British Columbia and is an analyst for NASCAR.com.
Canada still awaits a home-grown winner in the Daytona 500.
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