NASCAR used stop-motion miniature cars to recreate Denny Hamlin’s Daytona 500 victory

Want to relive the thrill of Denny Hamlin’s victory at Daytona 500 last year? Now you can in only 52 seconds.

The folks over at NASCAR recreated the final two laps of the 2019 race with miniature die-cast cars using stop-motion animation. If you don’t know what stop motion is, think Gumby. And if you’re too young to know who Gumby is, go watch an episode of Robot Chicken.

The cars were created by Lionel Racing, a division of Lionel Trains, which is headquartered is in Concord.

The video was posted Thursday afternoon on the NASCAR YouTube page and includes Joey Logano’s late pass of Kyle Busch in the final lap.

NASCAR hired a creative from the YouTube community, Blake Garcia, to create the video after finding his YouTube channel online. Garcia has been producing race videos for NASCAR for major races since last year and will continue to do so this season.

“Last year, we started investing a lot more resources in YouTube than we ever have,” NASCAR’s director of social media content Chad Littmann said. “We started spending more time there.”

Littmann said that while Twitter is still the sport’s biggest platform, there is a community of fans on YouTube that NASCAR is tapping into. The stop-motion videos are part of that.

You can watch the full thing above. And be sure to follow Observer reporter Alex Andrejev, who’s in Daytona Beach covering the Daytona 500, and all of our coverage of the Great American Race at CharlotteObserver.com.

If you’re a mobile app user having trouble viewing the video, you can see it here.

This story was originally published February 13, 2020 at 2:15 PM.

Matt L. Stephens

The Charlotte Observer

Matt L. Stephens is the Senior Sports Editor for The Charlotte Observer and oversees sports coverage for the Raleigh News & Observer, The State in Columbia, S.C., and McClatchy’s other properties across the Southeast. Before coming to Charlotte in July 2019, Matt was an award-winning editor, columnist and investigative reporter at The Denver Post and Fort Collins Coloradoan.