The Daytona 500 was wild, exciting and chaotic. The race started at 1:30 p.m. with the first 10 laps running smoothly, until the rain came pouring down around 2 p.m. During the four-hour rain delay, there were various interviews with the drivers and team members.
After the interviews took place, the racing started and Connecticut’s own Joey Logano dominated early on, taking a stage one win with by far the fastest car on the track. The first wreck happened on lap 63 between No. 38 Zane Smith, No. 11 Denny Hamlin, No. 2 Austin Cindric and No. 21 Josh Berry, with Smith having his race ended.
The next crash happened on lap 71 between various cars including No. 1 Ross Chastain, No. 91 Helio Castroneves, No. 19 Chase Briscoe, No. 8 Kyle Busch, No. 35 Riley Herbst and No. 40 Justin Allgaier, with Chastain and Castroneves unable to continue.
On lap 130, No. 12 Ryan Blaney edged Cindric to the stage two win. With 36 laps to go in the race No. 23 Bubba Wallace was in second. Being one of the best drafters in NASCAR, it looked like Bubba would edge out Cindric for the win. The thing is, the “Big One” had not happened yet. If you do not know what the “Big One” is, it is a massive crash or two during the end of super speedways that make or break who wins and losses and normally the “Big One” ends up taking out half the grid.
With 15 laps to go, the supposed “Big One” happened with No. 47 Ricky Stenhouse Jr, No. 22 Joey Logano, No. 9 Chase Elliott, Gragson, Busch and Blaney all being taken out with Logano and Busch out of the race for good.
With five laps to go, another “Big One” happened with No. 20 Christopher Bell losing control of his car and hitting No. 5 Kyle Larson and Wallace along with No. 60 Ryan Preece, who started doing a wheelie and flipped over twice in one of the scariest crashes in the last couple of years.
However, the crash Preece had was not even the worst one he has had at Daytona. His crash in August 2023 had him flip almost a dozen times at 190 miles per hour with his car on fire at the end of the barrel rolls. Preece came out of the crash okay and was cleared by the medical staff and did interviews just minutes after his crash. In the interview, Preece stated that “something needs to be done” since this is his second major accident at Daytona in three years.
On the final lap of the race, Cindric led with Hamlin not far behind, and with half a lap left, Hamlin took the lead. However, as quickly as Hamlin took the lead, No. 41 Cole Custer took out the top three in Hamlin, Cindric and No. 01 Corey Lajoie. The absolute chaos that unfolded with half a lap to go gave a go ahead for No. 24 William Byron to be a back-to-back Daytona 500 race winner, being only the fifth and youngest driver to complete that feat.
This Sunday at 3 p.m. is the Ambetter Health 400, which is a 260 lap, 400-mile race around Atlanta Motor Speedway. The Atlanta Motor Speedway is another superspeedway, but it is only 1.5 miles compared to the 2.5 miles of Daytona and Talladega. It is set to be a good race to watch, but the chaos may not be as much as the previously mentioned Daytona and Talladega.
In addition, there are Xfinity and Truck series races this upcoming weekend in Atlanta with the Truck series starting at 1:30 p.m. and the Xfinity series starting at 5 p.m. both on Saturday.