NASCAR’s 75th season officially began on Sunday with the 65th annual running of the Daytona 500.
During the 2023 season, the NASCAR Cup Series will have two events in Texas. The Circuit of the Americas in Austin will host the EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix on March 26. Texas Motor Speedway will host the AutoTrader EchoPark Automotive 400 playoff race on September 24.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr won Sunday’s race in Daytona to snap a personal 199-race winless streak and a 266-winless streak for his JTG Daugherty Racing team, narrowly edging last year’s Series champion Joey Logano.
Logano finished second, with Christopher Bell coming in third.
The win was Stenhouse Jr’s third in the NASCAR Cup Series and his first since 2017, which also came at Daytona International Speedway.
“That was a chaotic race,” Stenhouse told ESPN. “I felt like it was super competitive. Just tough to pass, and once you got your track position, you didn’t want to give it up, but my team did an amazing job.”
“…Man, it was a battle. We knew where victory lane was here, and we got back finally.”
Stenhouse got some help during the final lap, as a crash took several prominent drivers like Brad Keselowski, Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin, and Bubba Wallace out of the running and allowed him to take control.
“It looked like some guys got tangled up, upfront,” fellow driver Chase Elliot commented, according to the NASCAR website. “Those of us in the back were just scattering to kind of miss it. It looked like the No.5 [Kyle Larson] and the No.43 [Erik Jones] kind of went to the apron.”
“By the time we got slowed up, they were coming back across the track, and I was the lucky winner to get there first. It’s a bummer-long ways to go. Hate to end the day, but it is what it is.”
The race lasted 212 laps, which set a new Daytona 500 record by 12 and totaled a distance of 530 miles (7.5 miles longer than any previous Daytona 500 race).
The next scheduled race is the Pala Casino 400 in Fontana, California, at 2:30 p.m. CT on Sunday, February 26.
