William Byron Repeats At Daytona 500 After Ryan Preece Takes A Flying Flip
It took all day, but William Byron won his second Daytona 500 in a row on Sunday.
Byron found himself on the lucky side of a last lap wreck in overtime and was able to hold off Tyler Reddick with most of the field piled up behind them for the win.
The race went into overtime after Cole Custer turned Christopher Bell into the wall with five laps to go. Bell’s car came back into the the middle of the pack and collected Ryan Preece, whose car went airborne, flipped and hit the wall.
Preece was OK, but the incident brought to mind his massive barrel roll during the 2023 Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona.
The race started an hour earlier than planned just after 2 p.m. in an effort to avoid rain, but was red flagged after just 11 laps and didn’t get started again for more than three hours.
Joey Logano won the first stage under yellow, but he had an engine problem on the restart that checked up the cars behind him and caused several to crash. Martin Truex Jr., Ross Chastain and Helio Castroneves all ended up out of the race.
“It was fun while it lasted, but unfortunately were were just wrong place wrong time there,” said Truex, who retired from full-time driving last year.
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Logano’s team changed his engine control unit to no avail, then brought him back in for a new throttle body and discovered a rag had been sucked into the engine. A debris caution put him back onto the lead lap and he finished the second stage in eighth behind his teammates Ryan Blaney and Austin Cindric in first and second.
Logano’s return to the race would prove fateful. He was moving toward the front of the pack on the outside with 15 laps to go when he tried to get to the center lane under Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
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Stenhouse threw a late block that Logano later said caused him to check up, causing an accordion effect that that took several cars out of the race, including Kyle Busch who was looking for his elusive first Daytona 500 win in his 20th start.
Denny Hamlin was leading on the last lap when he got turned into traffic, but Byron and Reddick were able to slip through in the top lane. From there it was a sprint to the finish, but Byron had an insurmountable lead.
The pair were followed across the line by Jimmie Johnson, who managed to weave his way through the last lap crash that NASCAR decided to hold the yellow flag for as the leaders raced to the finish.
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