Inside Ricky Stenhouse’s Overdue Daytona 500 Win – Motorsports Tribune

It felt overdue.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Mike Kelley and JTG Daugherty Racing had shown up to the Daytona 500 with better cars than this one. Arguably, they had shown up with the best car in both the 2020 and 2021 runnings of the Great American Race with nothing to show for it.

Such is superspeedway racing.

Then came the arrival of the Next Gen platform in 2022, something that easily could have taken away whatever pace they had found with the old platform and seemed to once they qualified a second off the pace in time trials.

While they didn’t have the exceptional overall speed from previous seasons, they again found themselves in the lead pack at the end, before ultimately crashing out.

So, it comes with a degree of irony that the No. 47 finally broke through four years into their annual pilgrimage to Daytona, but only when it seemed as if it was the worst of four really good cars from a pure speed standpoint.

So too is superspeedway racing.

And yet, Kelley, woke up on Sunday morning with incredible conviction that they were going to win. The first thing he did upon unloading the car was place a piece of duct tape on the roll bar above the driver compartment so that only Stenhouse could see it upon climbing into the car.  

It read, ‘we believe, and we believe today.’ This was something he used to do during their tenure together at Roush Fenway Racing in the Xfinity Series when Kelley just wanted to speak to his driver in the most personal of ways.

But really, if there were any other days to believe with this much conviction, wouldn’t it have been all those other years after sitting on the pole in 2020 or having an equally strong car during Speedweeks in 2021?

They qualified 35th on Wednesday night.

“When we raced (the Duel) on Thursday night, I felt like we had a decent car, maybe a really good car” Kelley said. “By Friday (practice,) I knew we had an exceptional car. I could look at the data, I could look at enough stuff, I could visibly see it.

“I thought we had a great race car by the end of the week. That’s attributed to hard work. As hard as we got our teeth kicked-in during qualifying, it just pushed us harder.”

For his part, Stenhouse didn’t read into the qualifying results at all on Wednesday. While it was easier to look at going from 24th to 35th in Daytona 500 qualifying year-over-year, Stenhouse looked more at going from a second off the pole to seven-tenths off it.

“I said,…