It started in frustration. It ended in disappointment…but at least not in heartbreak.
Daytona Weekend started on what I thought would be a rather down note. After years of watching the Daytona Truck race on Fox Sports Racing (the old Speed Channel), to say nothing of practice and qualifying, there was nary a thing about NASCAR on that channel on this, the biggest weekend of the NASCAR season. Last year, (I think) the Trucks aired on CTV Speed and will again this year, from what I have heard. And that’s fine.
Except…
At least for this week, the Truck race, which started at 7:30 on a Friday night, was aired at 7:30 on a Saturday night. As I said on Reddit (don’t get used to it!) if I ever get down on myself for doing something stupid, at least I didn’t pull the brainfart of deciding to air a NASCAR race a full 24 hours later. Let’s put aside the fact that we live in the age of the Internet and social media, any platform for which would have spoiled the ending. By airing it 24 hours later, it meant after the ARCA and the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series races. You had to assume someone might mention the winner on one of those broadcasts. (As it turned out, they never mentioned the Truck race at all, past the fact that ARCA Daytona winner Gio Ruggiero finished second in the race.)
So there I was, faced with a no-win set of situations. All involved staying off the internet and social media for the weekend, which I was fine with. Do I watch the ARCA and O’Reilly series races, hope no one mentions the Truck race winner, and then watch the Truck Race? Do I PVR the ARCA and O’Reilly Series races, watch the replay of the Truck race, and then hope both PVR’d races took and watch them on Sunday morning? Or do I listen to the Sirius XM Broadcast and follow along on NASCAR.com?
In the end, I decided to take that last option and I have to admit. It worked! I was working away on the computer and was able to get a fair amount of things (nothing major but enough) done while still keeping tabs on the race. I probably wasn’t quite as engaged as I would have been by watching the TV broadcast, NASCAR being a very visual sport after all, but I still enjoyed it, and felt more productive.
As for the race itself, I was disappointed to see just how many non-series regulars were in the field, especially compared to how many drivers fell into the Did-Not-Qualify category. In what little I was on social media this weekend (a trend I hope to continue), I saw a fair amount of people excited about the Truck race, due to the fact that Tony Stewart and Cleetus McFarland were involved. (As it turned out, both wrecked and McFarland finished 37th and Stewart finished 36th of a 37-truck field.)
And having non-series regulars in the field to help draw attention to the series and the series regulars is great…to a degree. The problem is that NASCAR has a history of bringing in drivers from the Cup Series to the detriment of the Truck and O’Reilly Auto Parts Series.
One driver that fell into the DNQ category was Toni Breidinger, which was a bit of a shocker, but not surprisingly given the norm in the Craftsman Truck Series and O’Reilly Auto Parts Series. I understand that she’s running a part-time schedule and was the second-slowest qualifier, but if NASCAR wanted her to be the next female driver to attempt to get to Cup, hoping to outdo the efforts of Danica Patrick and Hailie Deegan, having her sit out the first race and the biggest weekend of the season is a bad look. Oh well, as long as Ricky Stenhouse, Jr., John Hunter Nemechek, and Michael McDowell got some extra practice.
At the end of the race, however, it was a series regular: Chandler Smith, pushing off his disappointment over missing out on qualifying for the Daytona 500 and got the best of a four-wide finish to get the first win in the Craftsman Truck Series for the 2026 season.
My pre-race pick was Grant Enfinger. He started fifth and finished 29th.
So, I ended up watching the ARCA race live on Saturday. To give you an idea of the importance of Daytona, the ARCA race was broadcast on Fox. Not one of their sports affiliates. The main Fox channel! Talk about giving one of NASCAR’s developmental series an opportunity to make an impression! For the most part, the ARCA series made the most of that opportunity, with some solid racing all day.
My pick for the win was Jake Finch and with just a couple of laps to go, I thought I might be able to brag on that pick. He was battling for the lead with Nitro Motorsports teammate Gus Dean when a bad push by Joe Gibbs Racing’s Gio Ruggiero sent both leaders spinning. The winner after the start? Ruggiero, of course.
I know this is all so Joe Gibbs can put another trophy in his display case, but having watched the #18 car dominate every ARCA race is really a detriment to a series that has a lot of great characters and storylines, from Andy Jankowiak, Daniel Dye, Isabella Robusto, the Kitzmillers, Cleetus McFarland and even Bobby Dale Earnhardt (who I was hoping would win at Daytona). The ARCA Series has the potential to be an exciting way to find your next favourite driver and watch them advance through the pipeline to Cup. It just needs some tweaking. It’s fine to have some big Cup team bring in drivers for try-outs for future opportunities in the higher series but (a) much like it should be in every series, let’s try and make sure that the 1st place car and the 31st place car are as close to having the same horsepower and resources as possible and (b) there’s no need to wreck the leader on a superspeedway to get the win.
The first points-paying race under the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series was a race dominated by Austin Hill and Richard Childress Racing. As an RCR guy, I enjoyed this race immensely. When Hill wasn’t leading (and there was a period where he faded back out of the Top 10), his RCR teammate, Jesse Love, was. This was just an RCR day, typical of the team at drafting tracks, going back to the days that Dale Earnhardt was the master at that discipline.
Hill logged his 15th career win and his 11th on a drafting track. If there’s anyone in NASCAR who has assumed the mantle from the late Dale Earnhardt as “Master of the Superspeedway and the Drafting Tracks,” it is Austin Hill.
Which is weird because isn’t the mantra of most of the “blue checkmark brigade” that “RCR has crap equipment. They never win anything”? Well, put RCR on a superspeedway and that “crap equipment” always seems to come to the front. And I know another mantra is that “superspeedway racing is just luck” and I’m sure that Hill’s skill at these type of tracks will be downplayed as him only being good at one type of race track.
Let’s take a look at some facts. He’s won at Daytona, Atlanta, and Talladega, but he’s also won at Las Vegas and Pocono (2023), Homestead-Miami Speedway (2024) and Martinsville (2025). His best finish in a Cup car came not at Daytona or Talladega, but was a 9th place finish at last year’s Chicago Street Course. Even if all of Hill’s wins were at drafting tracks, compare the rhetoric surrounding Shane Van Gisbergen. SVG (and I totally see why people refer to him as that rather than trying to type out his full name every time) has six Cup Series wins, all at the road courses. NASCAR has anointed him as the next big thing, despite the fact that, despite leading the Daytona 500 and at Talladega last year, he’s really only shown himself to being adept at road courses. On the mile-and-a-halfs and short tracks, he’s basically back with the also-rans. Basically, my point is: why is SVG praised while only showing success on one type of race track and yet Hill is disparaged for it?
My pre-race pick for the O’Reilly Auto Parts race was Hill, so I didn’t go goose egg for the weekend.
Sunday morning, I woke up and thought to myself. “Five years ago, I shuddered at the idea of Kyle Busch winning the Daytona 500. Now, I’m excited at the prospect of him finally getting that win!” I guess it’s like I said on the John Milner Track Talk page, “life is a marathon, not a sprint!” As I’ve learned a lot in life, things change, people change and this is one rare case where it changed for the better.
I wasn’t too sure about Kyle’s chances, mind you. In watching the Duels, I saw where he was leading for a bit. However, as the race went on, he seemed to drop back to mid-pack. Was he doing that intentionally to see how his car would handle in the pack, or was the #8 RCR Chevrolet built to put down a fast qualifying lap at the expense of the long haul? Did it have short run speed but not long run speed? We never did get an answer and eventually, Busch dropped out of the pack and fell back to 20th. A smart move on Busch’s past to avoid getting caught up in a wreck and damaging his car to the point he’d have to go to a back-up and forfeit his starting spot in the Daytona 500. (I’ve never understood why the front row for the 500 has to compete in the Duels but that’s another story for another day.)
Kyle wasn’t the only driver I was cheering for. I had picked Chris Buescher as the Daytona 500 in my Predictions for NASCAR in 2026 column, which apparently has been read by everyone on the planet, according to my stats. I had a lot of drivers I was cheering for. Joey Logano (for my Mom), AJ Allmendinger (for my late cat, Pepper – don’t laugh, there’s a story there), Austin Dillon (driving for RCR), Carson Hocevar (who might be my new favourite non-RCR driver), Brad Keselowski (my Mom’s second favourite driver) and Chase Elliott.
Ah yes, Chase Elliott. My Dad’s favourite driver in his last years (taking over for Dale Jr. and Bill Elliott). I had to ask myself “What is going to happen if Chase win this race? How emotional will I be?” As it turned out, as the last lap fell into place, Chase was out front coming down the backstretch. My Mom and I were on our feet. Joey’s chances forgotten. Kyle’s chances forgotten. Hocever, who had been leading at the white flag , was wrecked and would finish 19th.
Mom was cheering for Chase. I was cheering for Chase. And somewhere I knew, my Dad was cheering for Chase.
Chase was a mile away from victory. Almost at the same spot that Earnhardt had been when he seemed to be on the verge of a Daytona 500 win in 1990. But instead of a blown tire, it was a charging Tyler Reddick that denied Elliott the win. To make matter worse, Reddick’s teammate Riley Herbst and Brad Keselowski got together and collected not only Chase but also Joey Logano among others.
Tyler Reddick came out of almost nowhere, a name hardly in the discussion all day, and is now the 2026 Daytona 500 champion. With Reddick’s past with RCR, I wasn’t overly thrilled with the result but I thought “Well, good for him anyways!” My big question was, that since Reddick won a crown jewel event, should we expect an announcement on Tuesday that he’s signing with another team at the end of 2027? (Too soon?) I will say that I feel bad for Reddick because a lot of the post-race hype was more about Michael Jordan owning a team that had won the Daytona 500. Apparently, CP24, the Toronto-based news channel literally simply said words to that effect. While I will admit that Michael Jordan is my pick as the GOAT in basketball, he didn’t log any more laps than I did in this year’s Daytona 500.
Meanwhile, unlike a lot of people surrounding NASCAR after last year’s championship weekend, my first thought was “I didn’t get my way. How do we change this so that I will next time?” Quite honestly, the Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. fans out there might be a little up-and-arms about why they didn’t through the caution (thereby ending the race) during the initial wreck involving Hocevar. However, there has been precedent to not ending the Daytona 500 under caution when a wreck occurs IF there is no risk of a larger wreck taking place. (For example: if the wreck happens behind leaders on the last lap.) Please see: the final lap of the 2007 Daytona 500 or even last year’s 500.
While Reddick certainly wasn’t my pick for the win, it’s hard to find too much to complain about the race overall. I mean, the usual suspects did complain about the “fuel conservation mode” segment that saw three rows, ten deep, led by three Toyotas including Bubba Wallace closing in on the last dozen laps or so. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand what was happening but all I saw was three cars leading the Daytona 500. If this was a concerted effort to keep the Toyotas up front and slow the field down to give them an advantage….well, I’m not a Toyota guy but then I didn’t complain when the Kaulig Racing cars went three-wide to control the last lap at Talladega a few years ago. Meanwhile, you had thirty cars under a blanket and no wrecks. That’s something for NASCAR to hang its hat on and it was a lot more exciting than the single-file “follow the leader” racing that tends to happen about the midway point of these races.
The 2026 Daytona 500 had 25 different leaders (a 500 record) and 65 lead changes, second all-time. Four different drivers took the lead on the final lap. You had big teams like Penske (with Joey Logano), JGR (Christopher Bell )Hendrick (Elliott), and Reddick’s 23XI teammate Bubba Wallace and smaller teams (Ty Dillon and AJ Allmendinger for Kaulig Racing and Cody Ware from Rick Ware Racing), you had relative rookies (Front Row Motorsports’ Zane Smith and Trackhouse Racing’s SVG) to veterans (polesitter Busch).
What is not to like about superspeedway racing?
Oh yeah, the risk of big wrecks, like the one on the last lap. I know that as a NASCAR fan, I’m supposed to be watching just for wrecks. I’ve had everyone from the guy who installed my cable to two-time Cup Series champion Kyle Larson tell me that. But I’ll tell you, as someone who likes going against the grain and the narrative, I hate wrecks. No matter the situation, when I see a bad wreck, everything else stops. I want to see everyone driving away, exiting their cars or have their window nets down before I worry about who won. When Chase Elliott won at Talladega in 2019, I really couldn’t fully enjoy the moment. Why? Because on the last lap, Kyle Larson and Jeffrey Earnhardt had wrecked. The commentators noted that Larson was okay, but made no reference to Earnhardt’s status. (As it turned out, he was okay and has been in many races since.)
On Sunday, the last image I saw of the final wreck was Joey Logano’s back wheels being lifted off the ground before focusing on Reddick crossing the finish line. As Reddick celebrated, they did show both Keselowski and Elliott exiting their cars, but nothing about Joey. Was there a reason, I wondered.
From there, the coverage was of Reddick’s win and celebration and rightfully so. I went on social media for the first time all weekend but there was no updates or really even speculation about Logano. Eventually I saw Joey in the background of an interview and, a short time later, Mike Joy announced all had been checked and release from infield care centre. (Always good to hear no matter what your pre-race feelings about certain drivers might be.)
All in all, however, it was a great Daytona 500. (My pre-race pick of Chris Buescher finished 7th.) The Michael Jordan tie-in will certainly give the sport of NASCAR some mainstream media coverage. As for the change from the Playoffs to the Chase, well, we’ll have to see how that plays out. Meanwhile, off to Atlanta, another drafting track that’s become one of my favourites over the last several years.
johnmilner.ca 