{"id":27217,"date":"2019-07-08T14:25:34","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T19:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/racedaysa.com\/?p=27217"},"modified":"2019-07-09T16:03:50","modified_gmt":"2019-07-09T21:03:50","slug":"daytona-made-another-drivers-dream-a-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/2019\/07\/08\/daytona-made-another-drivers-dream-a-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Daytona made another driver\u2019s dream a reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service<\/em><\/p>\n

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. \u2013 In the bubbling cauldron that is Daytona International Speedway on race day, perhaps it\u2019s the closely bunched pack racing that is most responsible for producing near-magical outcomes\u2014none of which could have been more unexpected than Justin Haley\u2019s victory on Sunday in the rain-shortened Coke Zero Sugar 400.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Justin Haley, driver of the #77 Fraternal Order of Eagles Chevrolet, celebrates in victory lane after winning the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway on July 07, 2019 in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Photo by Sean Gardner\/Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

Haley\u2019s win with start-up Spire Motorsports, which had only one finish better than 28th<\/sup> in 17 previous races, also brought balance to the karmic equation. In last year\u2019s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Daytona, Haley was demoted to 18th<\/sup> after dipping below the double yellow line between the racing surface and the apron to make what was ostensibly the winning pass.<\/p>\n

In Friday night\u2019s Xfinity race, he finished a bittersweet second to Kaulig Racing teammate Ross Chastain. But on Sunday, after rain drenched the asphalt at the World Center of Racing, Haley, at 20 years, two months and nine days, became the third-youngest winner of a Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race, behind only 2011 Daytona 500 winner Trevor Bayne and 2009 New Hampshire winner Joey Logano.<\/p>\n

Haley seemed just as stunned as everyone else that he had won a Cup race in his third start in the series.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe stars aligned, and I didn’t ever think I was going to get redemption back from a few years back in Daytona\u2026 last year at Daytona when I got the Xfinity win taken away from me,\u201d Haley said.<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/racedaysa.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/MENCS_DIS2_Puchyr_Sospenzo_Haley_070719.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cTo come back and get redemption in the Cup Series is pretty cool, and it makes that second\u2011place finish with Kaulig last Friday a lot better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Haley is the latest to get a stunning victory at Daytona, he\u2019s hardly the first. In 2011, Bayne won the Daytona 500 in his second Cup start and never won again. David Ragan picked up his first Cup victory in July of that same year.<\/p>\n

In 2014, Aric Almirola got the first of his two Cup triumphs at a superspeedway (Talladega, 2018), and last year, the July race at Daytona gave Erik Jones his only Cup win to date.<\/p>\n

But if Daytona often adds unexpected winners to the NASCAR record book, the next stop on the Cup circuit\u2014Kentucky Speedway\u2014provides a reality check. The series has raced at Kentucky eight times. Only four different drivers have taken the checkered flag there, and all are former series champions.<\/p>\n

Brad Keselowski has won three times at the 1.5-mile speedway, which was repaved and reconfigured in 2016. Kyle Busch and two-time defending winner Martin Truex Jr. have two victories each at the track, which tends to identify the most successful drivers in the series. It\u2019s no coincidence that Busch, Truex and Keselowski come to Kentucky with a combined 11 wins in the first 18 races of 2019.<\/p>\n

Those three drivers also come to Kentucky during a season that has produced the best racing in recent memory on intermediate speedways. The statistics don\u2019t lie: green-flag passes at 1.5-mile tracks are substantially higher year-over-year, and green-flag passes for the lead are up 43.5 percent over last year.<\/p>\n

The June 30 race at Chicagoland Speedway, for example, produced two green-flag passes for the lead in the final eight laps, as Kyle Larson swapped the top spot with race winner Alex Bowman.<\/p>\n

Overall, through Sunday\u2019s race at Daytona, Kyle Busch leads the series with 1,378 quality passes (defined as passes while running in the top 15). At the same point last year, Chase Elliott was tops in that category with 939. Much of the year-to-year difference is reflected in the enhanced quality of racing at intermediate tracks.<\/p>\n

According to Joey Logano, reconfigured Kentucky, with two distinctly different sets of corners, will present a challenge to drivers as they search for clean air. This is the first time the Cup series will race at Kentucky with the higher-downforce, lower-horsepower configuration introduced this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just completely a different race track,\u201d Logano said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t even look the same from what it used to be, and once again it\u2019s going to be quite the different race track when you come there with this rules package. That\u2019s where it\u2019s really going affect us a lot on how we race each other.<\/p>\n

\u201c(Turns) 1 and 2 obviously is going to be pretty easy wide-open, but 3 and 4 is not going to be, and when you have cars that we have right now that, when you get in dirty air and that flat entry to Turn 3, I\u2019d expect the track to widen out a little bit to where we\u2019ll all be looking for air.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. \u2013 In the bubbling cauldron that is Daytona International Speedway on race day, perhaps it\u2019s the closely bunched pack racing that is most responsible for producing near-magical outcomes\u2014none of which could have been more unexpected than Justin Haley\u2019s victory on Sunday in the rain-shortened Coke Zero Sugar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":676,"featured_media":27208,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[287,619,16],"class_list":["post-27217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nascar","tag-daytona-international-speedway","tag-justin-haley","tag-nascar"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/racedaysa.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/MENCS_DIS2_Winner_070719.jpg?fit=4918%2C3278&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7hzTZ-74Z","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/676"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27217"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27221,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27217\/revisions\/27221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}