LOS ANGELES - NASCAR was the big winner at its glossy gala inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
In need of an energy boost ahead of its upcoming season, NASCAR broke its dated mold and staged an experimental exhibition inside one of the most iconic venues in sports. The race on a temporary quarter-mile asphalt oval was a sideshow in Sunday's made-for-Fox Sports spectacular.
Just how successful was the 44th edition of the Clash?
Two losing drivers high-fived a pair of NASCAR senior executives as they passed in the locker room for the University of Southern California football team. One of those executives was former driver Ben Kennedy, the 30-year-old great-grandson of NASCAR's founder and a forward thinker who pushed the annual preseason exhibition from its birthplace in Daytona Beach, Florida, across the country and into the Coliseum.
"Really good day for the entire sport," Kennedy said.
The Clash was a success before a single race car drove through the tunnel and onto the smooth, black asphalt that covered the Trojans' field. Ice Cube performed a six-minute set from the Peristyle during a brief "halftime," and Pitbull with backup dancers outfitted in a checkered-flag theme used the same stage for his concert before the race.
The grand marshals were L.A. sports greats, and NASCAR Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon lit the cauldron built for the 1932 Summer Olympics before the race began. Celebrities walked a red carpet, the USC student section filled in early, and the crowd booed Kyle Busch, who started in pole position, like a bunch of old pros during driver introductions.
Joey Logano won the race, and like nearly everyone else in the industry, the Team Penske driver heaped praise on NASCAR for successfully fulfilling Kennedy's vision.
"The hype around this, you watch football games lately, they're advertising the Clash as much as they're advertising the Daytona 500," Logano said. " That kind of puts it into perspective a little bit on what this event meant to our sport, how big of a gamble this really was, right? This could have gone awful. It went great."
AP photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez / NASCAR driver Joey Logano celebrates after winning Sunday's Clash exhibition race at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.Added runner-up Busch: "Ben Kennedy and the guys at NASCAR, if this didn't work, it was going to be ugly."
Instead, Busch was one of the drivers who high-fived Kennedy.
NASCAR moved the Clash to Los Angeles from Daytona International Speedway, its only home since its 1979 inception, as part of a focused effort to break from its dated traditions.
The Coliseum could hold about 60,000 fans for the race, and although it wasn't a sellout, the crowd was both strong and loud. NASCAR said at the start of the week that 70% of those who purchased tickets identified as first-time race attendees. The buildup in Los Angeles for next Sunday's Super Bowl - the Cincinnati Bengals will face the Rams at their SoFi Stadium in Inglewood - only helped publicize NASCAR's big party.
"I think it was a risk. We knew that from the start," Kennedy said. "As we've talked about the schedule over the past couple years, we talked about being bold, we talked about being innovative. This was something new, something different. We challenged ourselves, the team challenged themselves, to think about this event differently.
"We're really proud of the outcome."
The field was determined by heat races held earlier Sunday and a pair of last-chance qualifiers to give drivers one final chance to make the 23-car starting grid. The format made for spirited racing in the final qualifier as rookie Austin Cindric bounced and banged his way through traffic trying to transfer into the main event.
He fell short but was in good company. Former Cup Series champions Brad Keselowski and Kurt Busch were among the drivers who didn't make it out of the heats.
Kyle Busch started on the pole for the 150-lap feature that included a planned stop on the 75th lap for Ice Cube's set. Busch dominated the first half but was eventually caught by Logano, who never gave Busch a chance to move him out of the way for the win.
Logano won the Clash for the second time in his career. It was the fifth such win for Team Penske, which has won three of the last six runnings of what had traditionally been a warmup for the Daytona 500.
Nothing learned in Los Angeles will transfer into the season-opening Daytona 500 on Feb. 20, but the race was the first for NASCAR's Next Gen car, a long-planned project that was delayed a season by the coronavirus pandemic.
The car is designed to cut costs to teams, even competition throughout the field and produce a better racing product. The Next Gen didn't disappoint in its debut on the shortest track on the NASCAR schedule.