Daytona 500 results: Ricky Stenhouse Jr. edges Joey Logano to win thrilling race
Ricky Stenhouse Jr., in his words, has done the unbelievable.
After spending a bulk of Sunday’s race in the back of the field — avoiding all the craziness that this event all but guarantees — the 47 car crept up through the pack late and ultimately won this season’s Daytona 500.
He was the one in front when the race-ending caution came out after the white flag flew. He was only a few feet in front of Joey Logano.
This marks Stenhouse’s third career NASCAR Cup Series win — and his first Daytona 500 title.
A bonus: He is likely locked into the 2023 Cup Series playoffs, too.
“I think this whole off-season, (my crew chief) Mike (Kelley) just preached how much we all believed in each other,” Stenhouse told FOX Sports on the frontstretch. “They left me a note in the car that said they believe in me and to go get the job done tonight. I made a few mistakes. We were able to battle back.”
Stenhouse added: “Man, this is unbelievable.”
Daytona International Speedway was also the site of Stenhouse’s last NASCAR Cup Series win: the summer Daytona race in 2017.
The 212 laps run Sunday made this race the longest Daytona 500 in NASCAR history.
The 2023 iteration of NASCAR’s biggest race ultimately came down to two overtime restarts, where the only JTG Daugherty Cup driver started in the lead. He, Logano, Christopher Bell and Kyle Larson tussled for top positioning in that restart — and then, on the final lap, Travis Pastrana (running P7 at the time) got loose and collected a bunch of cars in the process.
Stenhouse was in the lead when the carnage came — and that sealed his win.
Logano finished second. Bell finished third. Chris Buescher finished fourth, and Alex Bowman (who sat on the pole) finished fifth. The rest of the Top 10: AJ Allmendinger, Daniel Suarez, Ryan Blaney, Ross Chastain and Riley Herbst.
The race featured 52 lead changes, 21 leaders and eight cautions for 38 laps.
Logano laughed but was clearly frustrated after his second-place finish on Sunday — one that saw him fall just a few feet short of his second Daytona 500 win. He then explained how the end of the race went down.
“Second is the worst, man,” Logano said. “You’re so close. Leading the white flag lap there, I was up front. Kyle gave me a good push and, yeah, you’re watching in the mirror and you’re three wide across there. I felt like the three wide was going a hurt a lane; looked like Kyle was getting pushed ahead, and then Ricky started getting pushed ahead.
“I knew if I went to the bottom my car didn’t handle good enough. I already got pushed off the bottom once and I thought, if I go down there, I’m probably going to get wrecked, and I don’t know if I can get down there in time to throw the block and so I didn’t want to wreck my car either. Then you don’t expect them to wreck either. You think you’re racing to the checkered flag and you put yourself in the best position to try to win at the start-finish line, and just caution came out — you wish you could race to the end. Obviously you can’t when they wreck that much.”
Bell, who finished third and started third on that fateful restart, said that he had originally planned to follow the leader — which was Stenhouse — but he changed his mind last-second.
“So I was committed to picking the leader, and I’m like, ‘I’m just going to pick behind the leader,’” Bell told reporters on pit road. “And then I thought back to Wednesday night, and the 47 did not qualify well at all, and the 5 qualified on the front row — that has to be worth something. And I decided to go behind the 5.”
Said Bell on the final restart: “Larson did an excellent job making sure I could stay attached to him. And then it was basically just a drag race — who could stay attached better and carry the momentum.”
There was a ton of drama in the final stage and overtime. But the first two stages displayed clean, competitive racing. Among the memorable moments: There was the Stage 1 instance where Herbst spun out heading into pit road. There was the incident a few laps later, when a Martin Truex Jr. draft-bump lightly nudged Bubba Wallace into the fence.
In Stage 2, there was the Tyler Reddick spin, which saw the No. 45 car get loose before slamming into the wall and making contact with a bunch of other cars. That run ended the days for Reddick, Erik Jones and Chase Elliott — and it also inflicted substantial damage on Ryan Blaney’s No. 12 car. (The hit didn’t immediately end Blaney’s day, but it effectively knocked him out of the chase for a Daytona 500 win that has so long eluded him.)
And then in Stage 3, with about 15 laps to go, there was a Michael McDowell spin-out that knocked out Chase Briscoe and Ryan Preece and badly damaged the cars commanded by Kevin Harvick and Martin Truex Jr.
But then came the end of Stage 3. And then came overtime — when Stenhouse was in the lead when it mattered most.
This story was originally published February 19, 2023 at 7:03 PM.
