Were now hours away from the first major live sport being played again. On Sunday, NASCAR makes their return for the first time in 70 days. All eyes are on them.

While that sounds great, it’s going to be an extremely difficult race for the drivers and teams.

First off, none of the drivers have been in a race car since March 8. Sunday, will be the first time in 70 days that they’ve done that. By comparison, the distance between the season finale last year and the opening day of track activity this year was 83 days. This is basically a return from an offseason except this time, there’s no practice nor qualifying to warm up prior.

Imagine going from one NBA season to the next without putting any jump shots up in between. Imagine having no open practices and only phone or computer interactions with your coach and teammates. Now, imagine coming back in a venue with no air conditioning with temps near 90.

That’s what’s happening on Sunday.

The teams, well they haven’t been able to work until the end of April. Plus, the shop crew can’t go to the track and the road crew, including the drivers, can’t go to the shop.

The first time anyone at Darlington would have seen this race car will be when it unloads. Then, the drivers’ first laps will be around the toughest track on the circuit at speeds in excess of 180 mph.

How will the drivers be physically? How will the cars hold up? The conditions are for sunny skies with near 90 degree temps. Not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. But here we go anyways.

With a green track, the start of Sunday’s race with all eyes on them is going to be as difficult as ever.

“It will be a little bit tricky adjusting on your car at the beginning of the race just because of the lack of rubber on the race track, said 2014 series champion Kevin Harvick. “It’s a race track that really evolves as the rubber gets on the race track and last year it was tough to drive on top of the rubber, so you really had to find different spots on the race track to move around.”

His former Stewart-Haas Racing teammate of Kurt Busch agreed saying that Darlington usually has some rubber on it before they race in the past. They have the luxury of having multiple rounds of practice for not just the Cup Series, but the Xfinity Series as well. Then, throw in qualifying for both and an NXS race and you get plenty of data for grip levels.

This Sunday, we have no data, no rubber and no way of knowing how the car is going to feel early on.

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“I think the biggest goal in this instance is to just not be in right field, try to get yourself in the ballpark and be able to adjust on it so you don’t have to have a rebuild and a reboot,” Harvick continued. “A few days later you can do that, but you can’t do that during the race, so we’re trying to be solid through these first several races so you don’t shoot yourself in the foot and have to try to reboot in the middle of a race because that will be tough, but you’re definitely gonna have to make changes and evolve with the race track as it changes.”

We know adjustments are going to have to be made all day. That’s why the best driver-crew chief combinations are going to be the ones rising to the top by the end of 293 laps.

“We’ve been sitting outside of a race car for over two months and then we’re gonna barrel it down into Turn 1 at 200 mph with no practice,” Joey Logano said last week. “That’s going to be a puckered up moment.”

Last year’s Southern 500 pole sitter William Byron agrees.

“It’s going to be difficult,” Byron said of the situation. “I think the biggest thing is just trying to prepare yourself well physically. Obviously you’re not going to get that chance to really go through practice and kind of warm up your muscles, I guess you could say, to get ready in the car.”

“A lot of it’s going to fall on the teams and the cars who hits the setup right. It’s going to be big because there’s a lot of variables there. You’re not going to have a chance to set the height of the car, predict where the splitter is going to end up, where the back is going to travel to. As a driver all you can do is put consistent laps together. You have to be efficient in traffic at the start of the race. I do feel like there’s going to be some mistakes made, some bounces off the wall things like that. You have to avoid that in the first run or so. Then you’ll start to see who really has the car after that.”

With so many driver-crew chief changes this past off season and only having four races in 2020 to work together, who’s going to figure it out the quickest?

The Kyle Busch-Adam Stevens combo and Kevin Harvick-Rodney Childers combos have been together as long as anyone in the sport. They could reap the benefits of this.