Our biggest race week arrives, with the Daytona 500 capping things Sunday

Any given time of the year, you can hear the sound of highly revved engines emanating from the big race track on the west side of town.

It could be sports cars in January, motorcycles in March and October, karts in December. Some racing organizations occasionally rent the track for their own private racing affairs, while the Richard Petty Driving Experience also takes over the track at times.

But it’s this particular time of year, and this particular sound — a deep, gravel-dipped rumble — that made the name of this place synonymous with stock-car auto racing: Daytona.

This week, across the river and several miles from where organizational plans were first jotted down in 1947, our homegrown NASCAR hits the Go button on another long season of racing.

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Gone are the days of good ol’ boys hauling their hulking, souped-up, American-made sedans on flatbeds down Interstate 95. Gone, too, is the long, drawn-out version of Speedweeks and the testing sessions preceding it.

Befitting our shrinking attention spans, Speedweeks is now a week. Not even, actually. Five days, beginning Wednesday with pole qualifying, and then six races over the next four days, culminating in Sunday’s 66th running of the Daytona 500, the 200-lap thriller that unabashedly also answers to “The Great American Race.”

The Daytona 500 was long ago dubbed “the Super Bowl” of stock-car racing, and often had casual onlookers wondering why a sports organization would schedule its Super Bowl at the beginning of the season. But for the past decade, NASCAR’s playoffs, as well as its racing calendar, has ended with the “championship” race, so now the sport has two big events book-ending the season.

But without a doubt, the Daytona 500 remains NASCAR’s crown jewel, packing some 120,000 fans into the Speedway and drawing several millions sets of TV-viewing eyeballs around the globe — year in and year out, the 500 dwarfs all other NASCAR races in the Nielsen Ratings.

For good reason, by the way. Since 1988, when NASCAR started hamstringing horsepower at its mammoth sister tracks — Daytona and Talladega — that nod toward safety and sanity has had the unintended consequence of equalizing the Haves and Have Nots.

The engine restrictions have created huge gaggles of growling automobiles, door-to-door and nose-to-tail, for laps on end. While they’re no longer breezing past the 200-mph barrier, those traffic jams are still taking place at about 190 mph.

And though it’s a hairy ride from the get-go, the uptick in intensity ratchets up dramatically when the lap count starts closing in on 200. You can quite literally feel it, whether you’re watching from home or the grandstands.

It occasionally scares you, but it never disappoints.

Wednesday night, they’ll determine which two drivers will start Sunday’s big race on the front row. In earlier times, those two drivers of the two fastest cars in town would become the odds-on favorites to become a Daytona 500 champ. Nowadays, the variance in speeds, from front to back, is too minuscule to declare such things.

Also, with the field-bunching speed restrictions, nearly every driver in the 40-car field will be capable of competing for victory in the closing laps. Five of the last seven winners, including Ricky Stenhouse last year, didn’t win anywhere else in the season that followed.

Take a look at all of the drivers turning qualifying laps Wednesday evening. While some of them are here looking to further cement a great NASCAR career, most are hoping to define it.

Daytona's Schedule of Events

Tuesday: The welcome-to-town parade of NASCAR team haulers at One Daytona, 5-7 p.m.

Wednesday: Daytona 500 pole qualifying, 8:15 p.m. (Fox Sports 1)

Thursday: Duel at Daytona, two 150-mile qualifying races to the Daytona 500 lineup, 7:15 p.m. (FS1)

Friday: Truck Series race (Fresh From Florida 250), 7:30 p.m. (FS1)

Saturday: 200-mile ARCA Series race, 1:30 p.m. (FS1); Xfinity Series' United Rentals 300, 5 p.m. (FS1)

Sunday: Daytona 500, 2:30 p.m. (Fox)

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NASCAR hits town, Daytona 500 kicks off another season Sunday