DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Travis Pastrana entered the 2023 Daytona Speedweeks attempting to make his first NASCAR Cup Series start at age 39, a full decade after last running stock cars full-time. He was looking to do it in the sport’s biggest race, driving a new third entry for 23XI Racing that had never been run on track before.
Considering all that, ending the race 11th had to feel like a win for Pastrana.
And it did.
“I led a lap at the Daytona 500 and finished top 20,” Pastrana said afterwards. “The car is not a complete write off, so the kid’s college fund is intact. It was a win and it was awesome.”
Awesome was not the best description of Pastrana’s first pit stop, though. A penalty for passing through too many pit boxes had him losing the lead draft, putting him a lap down through the first stage and much of the second.
But a smart use of the wave around after stage two got Pastrana back on the lead lap. From there, his No. 67 Toyota handled well in the draft, positioned for a decent finish heading into the final stretch.
That’s when a few lucky breaks went his way, with a wreck in the first overtime leaving Pastrana inside the top 10 heading to what became the final restart. A driver who was hoping to just finish this thing had his competitive instincts kick in; the former X-Games star was hungry for more.
“Let’s see how far we can get up [there],” Pastrana said of his thinking. “I really wanted to give my teammate [Bubba Wallace] more help, but once he locked on the bumper of whoever was in front of him and I wasn’t on his bumper, I kind of left him.
“So that was disappointing, but still made a pretty good run coming across the white flag. When that top started going, I thought, we might be top-five here.”
That’s when things went sideways, as contact between Pastrana and Aric Almirola sparked a last-lap wreck that ended the race under caution.
“My car had been pretty tight even off of [turn] 4,” Pastrana explained. “So, I was super surprised that it got as loose as it did, and we’d been a little loose on the top and we were all the way up on the top. Just disappointing.”
Still, when the smoke cleared, an 11th-place finish was well above Pastrana’s expectations for the event. He wound up the highest-finishing 23XI driver, too, after Wallace and Tyler Reddick got caught up in wrecks of their own.
Does that mean more Cup starts are on the horizon? Sadly,…
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