No practice for the Daytona road course races. https://twitter.com/dustinlong/status/1285220717215318022

I know that there have already been some responses about the field being doomed going into Turn 1 and I don't believe that it is that drastic because the majority of the field can handle themselves but I do believe that there should be practice for a variety of reasons.

I wrote last month about how removing practices will be detrimental to the smaller teams and I believe that the Daytona road course might be the first place where we see that play out because of that gap in tools that are available. https://www.hagerty.com/media/motorsports/removing-practice-for-nascar-races-is-not-a-long-term-solution/

The large teams will likely be mostly fine because they have these simulation tools available to them and also have manufacturer backed programs that have run this course that have at least some data to help them figure out how to configure the cars.

It's not hard to see the connections for the data as all three manufacturers have teams that run in IMSA and also use the same simulator tools that their NASCAR teams use.

All of their teams have access to the simulators so most will have some useful data but the smaller teams likely won't have the resources to interpret it all like the bigger teams which will create the gap in performance.

So as far as the Cup race goes, I'm not terribly concerned about incidents especially when you consider that there will be stoppages for stages and if any cautions come out it will be a full course yellow so the drivers won't have to deal with local yellows like in IMSA.

The only unknowns are probably the very far back of the Cup field but they will most likely be riding around trying to keep their cars together although there might be an opportunity for an incident like we saw with the #00 yesterday.

There might be some shakeups in Xfinity and Trucks but I expect that most of the smaller teams will be trying to preserve their cars because many of them don't have more than one or two road course cars. https://twitter.com/charlie_grafton/status/1285245431694471169?s=20

Xfinity will also be running back to back road course races so I expect many teams to also be conservative at Road America because they will only have a short amount of time to turn cars around for the Daytona road course. https://twitter.com/Collin_Fern/status/1280958125554700290

With all of that said, I still believe that practice would have been a good idea and would make the race better and allow for more options for the starting order like ordering by speed based on the results from that practice.