DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – FEBRUARY 16: Kyle Busch, driver of the No. 8 zone Chevrolet, Ryan Blaney, driver of the No. 12 Menards/Peak Ford, Joey Logano, driver of the No. 22 Shell Pennzoil Ford, and Chase Elliott, driver of the No. 9 NAPA Auto Parts Chevrolet spin after an on-track incident during the NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on Feb. 16, 2025, in Daytona Beach, Florida.
The dicey racing and ticking of laps made it inevitable.
With 15 laps to go in the Daytona 500, Joey Logano got a run on Ricky Stenhouse Jr. He saw an opportunity to get below him and have another Ford push him. So he dropped to the middle line, but Stenhouse blocked him in Turn 2.
“From my perspective, I felt like to win the race, I had to get to the second row in my line there,” Logano said. “I was in third and needed to get to second.”
Logano tried to thread the needle down the backstretch between Stenhouse on the outside and Ryan Blaney on the inside. Again, Stenhouse blocked. Logano checked up, but bounced off Kyle Busch to his inside, turned Stenhouse, and triggered the Big One.
Busch, who rallied from a penalty at the end of Stage 1, got hit by Stenhouse and spun down the track. He avoided the inside wall but cut all his tires and needed a tow back to the garage. Thus, costing him a chance to win the Daytona 500 on his 20th attempt. Like the late Dale Earnhardt did in 1998.
“It sucks to have our race end the way it did,” he said. “When we got collected in the wreck at the end, all four tires were flat. We were towed back to the work area in the garage, where the guys looked over the car and didn’t see anything massively wrong. All the wheels were pointed in the right direction, so we changed tires and went back out to see what the next step would be. Unfortunately, when we came back into the work area in the garage, we got parked and told that our race was done.”
This multi-car incident was one of three in the closing 15 laps, plus overtime, of the 2025 Daytona 500. Ryan Preece suffered his second rollover in two years on the backstretch at Daytona International Speedway. William Byron snuck through the crash on the final lap to go back-to-back in the Daytona 500.
