NASCAR Cup Series 65th Annual Daytona 500
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It had been over five years since Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. won a NASCAR Cup Series race. Driving for single-car team JTG Daugherty Racing, the 35-year-old vet had collected just five top-5 finishes in 108 starts since joining the organization in 2020. But that didn't stop crew chief Mike Kelley from posting a simple note above his dashboard before Sunday's Daytona 500.

It read: "We believe."

The note idea came to Kelley randomly after waking up at 3:30 a.m.

"It's just getting Ricky to believe in himself again," Kelley explained. "And getting the people around us to believe in the situation we're in. That's always been my attraction to this team is, we have the parts and pieces. It's just aligning them right."

Now Stenhouse has made believers out of everyone, holding off defending Cup champion Joey Logano in double overtime to earn an improbable 2023 Daytona 500 victory. The longest Great American Race in history, Stenhouse survived 212 laps by asserting himself in the draft with the type of superspeedway knowledge that earned him two previous Cup wins with Roush Fenway Racing in 2017.

JTG Daugherty is now the first single-car team to win the Daytona 500 since Trevor Bayne and the Wood Brothers in 2011. Co-owner Brad Daugherty also became the first black man in history to earn the trophy. His belief in Stenhouse, along with that of Tad and Jodi Geschickter, paid off after giving the driver a contract extension to stay with the team last season.

"We didn't give up on Ricky because personally, I feel like he's got the spirit of a winner and I like what he represents as a person," Jodi Geschickter said. "I see flashes of brilliance in what he does. I felt like he could do it. I felt like he could get the job done, and I never questioned that."

Stenhouse showed that spirit after he didn't give up following a pit road speeding penalty on lap 179. Out of the draft and in position to go a lap down, a crash just moments later happened in the very spot in the pack Stenhouse was running beforehand.

"That gave us a second chance," Stenhouse said. "Once the caution came out, I really had to kind of put my elbows up and get back to the front to give us another shot to win."

That's when Stenhouse's lovable personality came in to help him. Good friend and Cup champion Kyle Larson, running with top-tier equipment at Hendrick Motorsports, superglued himself to the No. 47 when the race went back green. The tandem worked their way into position, then capitalized after Kyle Busch struggled on the restart during the first overtime.

"He's one of my best friends, so I was like yelling into my helmet when we both went to the lead," Larson said. "I was hoping it was going to stay green so it would have been me or him for the win. I can't wait to go give him a big hug, because he is one of my great buddies."

Larson had to wait for a very Helio Castroneves-ish fence climb first as part of the victory celebration. But Stenhouse, a fitness nut, added a little twist of his own: a few pull-ups.

So can this Daytona win lift Stenhouse's performance long term? At minimum, the victory almost guarantees him a postseason spot under NASCAR's current playoff format.

"We're not done," Stenhouse said. "I think Mike (Kelley) and I got a lot of things left to do … the resources we have now, moving forward throughout the 2023 season, there's still a lot left to prove that we can go be competitive on all racetracks."

The knock on Stenhouse has always been he's a talented driver who doesn't believe in himself enough. Maybe a win on the sport's brightest change will finally change that crisis of confidence.

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Green: Travis Pastrana -- It's not often this spot gets reserved for an 11th-place finisher. But the former X Games superstar making his first NASCAR Cup Series start, at age 39, drove a masterful race. He charged back from a lap down, avoided the crashes and became adept at moving through the draft.

"I led a lap at the Daytona 500 and finished top 20," Pastrana said afterwards. "The car is not a complete write off, so the kid's college fund is intact. It was a win and it was awesome."

Yellow: Ryan Blaney -- Blaney had heavy contact with other cars during a stage two wreck and limped around a lap down for most of the final stage. It was a sorry end to the Daytona 500 for a trendy pre-race favorite, although a bevy of wrecks at the end got him back on the lead lap, where Blaney somehow charged to eighth despite a car that appeared headed for the scrap heap.

"Better than sitting in the trailer," Blaney said when I asked how it felt to limp that car home.

Red: Ford -- The Blue Ovals that dominated Thursday's Daytona Duel races, winning both of them, seemed well positioned entering the final stage. Then, three of the four Stewart-Haas Racing cars wrecked before the RFK Racing tandem of Brad Keselowski and Chris Buescher made the wrong moves down the stretch. No victory and just three Fusions inside the top 10 became a shocking end result.

Chevys, meanwhile, wound up with five inside the top 10, including the winner, despite leading 44 of 212 laps – the fewest of any manufacturer.

Speeding Ticket: Bump drafting gone wrong -- From the start of Daytona Speedweeks, when Daniel Suarez turned Kyle Busch on the backstretch, a lot of these wrecks seemed to be caused by bad bumps in unexpected places. NASCAR's been lax on enforcing any rules surrounding it, as it's hard to regulate contact in superspeedway races designed to keep cars together like glue.

However, you have to be concerned when you hear quotes like this one from Ryan Preece after wrecking out due to contact with Michael McDowell.

"The steering slip is so quick that when you get sideways, it's really difficult to correct it," Preece said of the sport's Next Gen chassis. "Just, don't put yourself in that situation. You won't have that problem."

But with at Daytona, Talladega and Atlanta, where NASCAR runs this superspeedway package, avoiding the bumps are certainly impossible. Safety is always a concern here.

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The most impactful wreck of the night came on the backstretch in the first overtime. William Byron, with another one of those bad bumps, sent Austin Dillon hard right into a mess of traffic, collecting over a dozen cars in the melee.

That left Dillon's new Richard Childress Racing teammate, Kyle Busch, without a drafting partner, leaving a fast No. 8 helpless in the pack after leading heading into overtime. Busch was then eliminated in a last-lap wreck, winding up 19th and ruining a bid to win his first Daytona 500 some 25 years after Dale Earnhardt ended his drought.

"This was the first time I led lap 200," Busch said after the race. "I wish it was 1998 rules."