‘Home Turn’ shows a side of Daytona you won’t see during the Daytona 500

If you’re looking to get a sense of what Daytona Beach is actually like ahead of the Daytona 500, you can do it in under 30 minutes instead of booking a trip to Florida.

“Home Turn,” a show hosted by Yahoo Sports’ Jay Busbee, debuted on NASCAR’s YouTube channel on Tuesday. The documentary — available at the top of this post — focusses on the city and culture of Daytona and is a partnership between NASCAR Studios and Bluefoot Entertainment, the group behind the “TrueSouth” series on the SEC Network.

The show has plenty of nuggets for those who’ve never been to Daytona and those of us that have been to the area too many times to count. Even Busbee said he learned a lot while filming.

“I’d always known the history of the area, but the way you can draw a literal straight line from the sands at the waterline right to the start-finish line at Daytona International Speedway, both literally and metaphorically, is pretty great — the same drive that pushed men to rip down the beach at 300 miles an hour a century ago pushes them to claim the lead coming out of Turn 4 on the final lap today,” Busbee said.

“Plus, I learned why DIS is shaped the way it is … there used to be a dog track beyond what is now Turn 1, and so they created the tri-oval so they could have both the size and the banking they wanted. The dog track is long gone, but the tri-oval shape remains.”

Daytona is a city known for NASCAR, of course, but also its role as a host for MTV’s “Spring Break” for many years. The area is trying to get past that now, and like any community looking to remake its image, it’s not an easy process. In a conversation near the end of the show, lifelong Daytona resident and Daytona Beach News-Journal writer Ken Willis notes that Daytona is caught in the past while also attempting to modernize itself.

It was easy to see how that situation applies to NASCAR too. The stock car series has experienced a lot of turnover in the past decade as the boom years of the 2000s get further and further in the rearview mirror. Its new crop of drivers aren’t on the star paths the likes of Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. were on, and NASCAR is attempting to figure out how to navigate its new and much more niche place in the sports world.

“It’s a great connection, because both NASCAR and Daytona Beach had such mountainous highs in the past, and those highs cast a long shadow,” Busbee said. “Both of them are having to adjust to new tastes — people aren’t as interested in massing at a beach and sleeping 10 to a hotel room for spring break anymore, and people aren’t as interested in sitting for four-plus hours to watch racing any more. Plus, you always romanticize your past over the allegedly less-colorful present, and that’s what both NASCAR and Daytona Beach have to contend with — people’s memories versus current reality. Both are in the process of reinventing themselves, and both are now recognizing that what worked in the past won’t work to carry them into the future.”