By David Morgan, Associate Editor
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – This one has been a long time coming.
Harrison Burton, driving the famous No. 21 Ford for the Wood Brothers, took matters into his own hands in overtime Saturday night at Daytona, powering his way into the lead on the final lap and holding off the charge of Kyle Busch to claim his first career NASCAR Cup Series victory and punch his ticket into the Playoffs.
The win also marks the 100th career win for the legendary Wood Brothers team, which has been sitting on 99 wins since Ryan Blaney last won for the team back in 2017.
“It’s amazing. It’s been the hardest three years of my life, obviously the hardest three years for some of these guys’ lives. To win the way we just did, beat the best in the business, Kyle Busch, across the line, it’s pretty fantastic,” Burton said.
“I made a bet with Jeremy, my crew chief, that if we won, we’re staying here and driving home. We’ll be at a bar somewhere. Come find us (laughter). We’re going to celebrate this one.”
Since joining the team on a full-time basis in 2022, Burton has no doubt struggled to find his footing and as a result finds himself without a ride heading into 2025. For now, the 23-year-old can focus on the here and now and celebrating a milestone win for both he and the team as the gear up for the Playoffs.
“I cried the whole victory lap,” said Burton. “Obviously got fired from this job. I wanted to do everything for the Wood Brothers that I could. They’ve given me an amazing opportunity in life. To get them 100 on my way out is amazing. We’re in the Playoffs now. Let’s go to Darlington and see what happens.”
Meanwhile, it’s a night that ends in ‘What If?’ for Kyle Busch, after leading at the white flag only to have to watch another car cross the finish line first. Like Burton, Busch was in a must-win position coming into the night, with his only path to the Playoffs going through Victory Lane.
He’ll now have to go into Darlington and win to keep his multi-year streak of Playoff appearances alive.
“Just finished second. It’s all good. We were really, really, really lucky tonight to miss a few of them crashes,” said Busch
“All good. Just real proud of everybody, Randall, all the guys at RCR, ECR did a great job, brought a fast car. Was hoping we could get those three No. 8 specials on Monday, get some chicken tenders rolling, but wasn’t meant to be.
“We’ll take this. Got a good little stretch going with these last three weeks, and hope we can do what we need to do next week.”
Christopher Bell charged back to third-place at the finish after losing contact with Busch on the backstretch on the final lap, which allowed Burton to get the run he did to power into the lead and the eventual win.
Cody Ware and Ty Gibbs would round out the top-five finishers.
The remainder of the top-10 went to Bubba Wallace, Parker Retzlaff, Brad Keselowski, Daniel Hemric, and Chris Buescher.
Daytona Destruction
Cautions were anything but minor on Saturday night, with six of the seven caution flags that flew coming for a major incident.
The first came when Daniel Suarez No. 99 Chevrolet burst into flames on pit road during the Stage 1 break. Suarez had come down pit road with the rest of the field for tires and fuel when a fuel spillage out of his machine set off a wild chain of events.
Denny Hamlin, pitted behind Suarez, pulled forward to exit his pit box when a backfire from his car ignited the spilled fuel, which traveled directly to Suarez’s car and caught it on fire.
Suarez left pit road seemingly unaware of the growing blaze, but by the time he had gotten back around to pit road, it was a true inferno. His pit crew pulled him from the car as fire and safety workers worked to get the blaze extinguished, but the car was a toasty mess by the time all was said and done.
“I was doing my pit stop just like every single weekend. The No. 11 (Denny Hamlin) was right behind me and the No. 21 (Harrison Burton) was right in front of me, so unfortunately I got boxed in. We know that every single time we do a pit stop, we drop a little bit of fuel and that’s completely normal,” Suarez explained.
“Unfortunately, the No. 11 was leaving his pit stall right behind me, and because he was waiting for me to leave, his exhaust fired up the little fuel I dropped. Because I was still parked there, that went up the back of my car where the fuel cell is and it just grabbed it. It was a very unfortunate situation. I don’t know what we could have done differently. Just sad that we’re out of the race this way, but I’m glad I’m fine and the entire team was fine.
“The other crazy thing is that I was able to feel the heat, but because I don’t run a rearview mirror and only run the rearview camera, I couldn’t see it. The rearview camera is connected to the rear bumper, so I could see the smoke, but I couldn’t see the fire. I could feel the heat, but I couldn’t see how big it was.”
Lap 61 saw the first multi-car crash of the evening, a 17-car pileup on the backstretch when an errant push set off the melee, involving the likes of Noah Gragson, Chase Elliott, Ross Chastain, Martin Truex, Jr., Ryan Preece, and others.
The crash was a huge hit for Chastain, who came into the night teetering on the Playoff cut-off line, but will have work to do next weekend at Darlington to make it into the postseason.
“I haven’t seen what happened yet, but we kind of struggled at the beginning of the race with the front balance and then we made adjustments out of the first pit stop and felt like we had it decent,” Noah Gragson said. “We had the bottom lane rolling and were up to maybe the top 10 or the top 15 on the bottom line. I got up to the middle and I was behind the 1. He looked real darty, real squirrely so I was trying to bail out of there and get out.
“I haven’t seen what happened yet, but I was trying to get out of that line. I don’t know if I got ran over or what the case was, but once I see it I’ll see more. If it was my fault, I want to apologize to the other guys, but I don’t really know yet. It’s just a bummer.”
The next major incident was another multi-car crash on Lap 153, involving again a double digit number of cars in Turn 1.
Michael McDowell, who had been a strong contender all night after starting on the pole, was sent around after an bump from Austin Cindric that saw his car get airborne momentarily as it rode sideways on the hood of Joey Logano’s Ford before setting back down.
Among those collected behind in the chaos were Kyle Larson, Alex Bowman, Tyler Reddick, and a host of others.
“I’m fine. I don’t know what it looked like. I closed my eyes,” said McDowell. “Anytime you get turned in front of the field while leading it, you know somebody is gonna hit you. There’s no way you’re getting out of it. I’m just bummed.
“We had a really fast Long John Silver Ford Mustang. I’m really proud of everybody at Front Row. We had a ton of speed with both cars this weekend and with a few laps to go we put ourselves in position to win the race and that’s what we wanted to do. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to the end and that’s part of this racing.
“I haven’t watched it in detail to know exactly what happened, so I don’t want to throw any opinions out there because Lord knows that I’ve made plenty of mistakes at superspeedways and I want to make sure it wasn’t me. But I felt like I got turned getting down into turn one. The wrong angle at the wrong time, but Austin was doing a great job of pushing me. We had a good run and you’re at the end of these races, so I’m not faulting him. We were trying to do what we could.”
The final and most vicious crash of the night belonged to Josh Berry, who was also racing for his Playoff life at the front of the field when he was sent for a ride on the backstretch on Lap 160, taking Austin Cindric with him.
While McDowell’s car set back down in his airborne ride before going completely over, Berry wasn’t as lucky as his Ford blew over like it was made of paper, slamming back down on the roof and then skidding upside-down into the inside SAFER barrier, where it hit like a ton of bricks.
After spinning like a top following the impact, Berry’s car would come to rest. Seconds later, safety workers would arrive on the scene and worked to right his car and get him out.
The race was red flagged as a result and shortly, he was out of the battered machine and seemingly no worse for wear.
“I just looked like the 2 got pushed into me and, unfortunately, we’re seeing a lot of these blow overs lately, but I mentioned on the TV broadcast – obviously paving that section helped keep me from really barrel rolling,” Berry said.
“As bad as it looked, they made a big improvement over what Ryan had last year. I just can’t believe we flipped two of our Stewart-Haas cars in a row like that, but it was just a great job by Rodney and this whole 4 team. We were in contention all night and had a hell of a race car and had a shot at it.”
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