LIer Lally gets 1st chance at Daytona 500

NASCAR's circular logic is perfectly clear to Northport native Andy Lally, who Sunday will be among the 43 competitors in what is both the season-opener and championship event of auto racing's big league.

The Daytona 500, which has surpassed the Indianapolis 500 as the traditional leader in generating attention for racing, has become so big that it widely is labeled the "Super Bowl of Racing" (though the sport's loyalists prefer to call that competitive extravaganza of two weeks ago "the Daytona 500 of Football.")

Beyond the on-site crowds near 150,000 and close to 20 million television viewers worldwide, Daytona offers a field stocked with the sport's heaviest hitters; today's race will include recent champions Jamie McMurray, Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Matt Kenseth, Kevin Harvick and Michael Waltrip.

And here is Lally, who has gotten only a small taste of the NASCAR-style discipline in the past two years, ready to go round-and-round with the best. At 36, his third 24 Hours of Daytona endurance victory last month made him the winningest GT driver in Grand Am Series history, but this is his Daytona 500 debut.

"The steepness of my learning curve is almost vertical," Lally said in a telephone interview. "The size of NASCAR racing is massive. The amazing competition in this race, how tight it is and how fast it is, going 200 miles per hour for 500 miles, cars three-wide; just to be in this field is an honor, and it's humbling.

"But this is an amazing opportunity for me to make the transition to [the NASCAR Sprint Cup circuit] full time."

As a young lad, Lally said, he played "every sport imaginable" and remains an eager participant in mountain-biking and street-luging, "but one of the hardest things I've trained for is auto racing. You have to sustain a high heart rate in high heat for a long, long time; you've got to be stable, stay aware of what's going on. You've got a million decisions to make, even when you're down and worn out.

He will be piloting the No 71 Chevrolet he has been driving for TRG Motorsports since 2009, parachuted into one of the Daytona's 35 guaranteed starting positions based on a complicated system of transferring points earned by car owners in 2010. All he has to do is adjust his road-racing "skill sets," he said, "to dealing with the car's asymmetrical set-up to run ovals. You take for granted you can adapt to that, but we use a completely different style of tire" in NASCAR events.

"Auto racing is all about feel," he said. "It's not just about - what's the nice way to say this? - having more guts than the next guy." Though guts are helpful. "At 200 miles an hour, trying to put that car on an exact mark going into a turn, what the car feels like on the entry - as opposed to a road course - you have to adapt to that. You have to understand that tire. You have to absorb the information coming into your brain very quickly."

Lally got his first go-kart at 4 and first raced at 12, and driving fast machines "was all I wanted to do." It was his youth soccer coach in Northport, Peter Madsen, who introduced Lally to Walter Simendinger, then owner of the Tyrolean Motors import shop in Northport and, on the side, a race-car driver.

"He was getting ready to retire and was looking for a young guy to help out," Lally said. And he found a pupil most eager to get up to speed.