DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Fifty-two lead changes among 21 drivers. Only three in-race cautions over the race’s first 198 laps and then three more over the final 13 laps, 10 run in overtime. A Daytona 500 winner who didn’t take the lead until that OT and then pulled into Victory Lane for the first time in more than five and a half years.
It all reads like an unlikely confluence of racing events. A once-in-a-lifetime Halley’s Comet sort of sighting. A NASCAR unicorn. But it is none of the above. Not at Daytona. Not in stock car racing’s biggest race run on its biggest roulette wheel.
No, that spaghetti pile of closing laps statistics and sheet metal has become the Great Modus Operandi of the Great American Race. A few hours of calm followed by a few laps of chaos followed by a driver standing in Victory Lane who is proud to be there but deep down, if they’re being honest, also sort of can’t believe it.
“It feels like a dream, it really does,” winner Ricky Stenhouse Jr. confessed as he received a conga line of hugs from a seemingly endless number of revelers from one-car, scrappy JTG Daugherty Racing. “But I know it’s real because I know how hard everyone right here has worked. How hard I have worked. This racetrack tonight has finally given us the breaks we’ve been so close to getting for so long. Standing right here took so long. But right now, it was worth it all.”
Worth a personal wait for Stenhouse of 2,060 days. Five years, seven months, 19 days. Nearly 68 months. One hundred ninety-nine races. That’s how long it had been since he’d won a NASCAR Cup Series event, also at Daytona, the summertime 400-miler of July 1, 2017. This is only his third win in a decade of trying. For JTG Daugherty, the drought was even longer. The No. 47 car hadn’t been covered in confetti and champagne since August 10, 2014, a total of 3,116 days. This is only their second trophy to take back to the race shop. The biggest single-race trophy that can be won in NASCAR.
“We’ve always had to take a little less into these weekly fights with these big-dollar teams and that’s okay, that’s who we are, but there were nights when we asked, ‘Can we keep these lights on?'” team co-owner Tad Geschickter explained Sunday night, standing alongside wife Jodi. The couple moved their team up from the Xfinity Series to Cup ahead of the 2009 Daytona 500, joining forces with former NBA All-Star Brad Daugherty (he started the day at Daytona but missed the celebration after feeling…
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