Austin Cindric wins 2022 Daytona 500, edging out Bubba Wallace in Photo finish (2-20-22)
By: Becca Cottingham
Headline Photo Courtesy: Bleachers Report
We start the year off with the Great American Race. It does not take long for fans watching from home to get into their feelings. After a segment on Sherry Pollex and her battle. Then when we get on track things get shaken up quickly as well even if it was not planned. Brad Keselowski quickly takes over the lead. We see pit stops and get the first pit road plenty with Ty Dillon for speeding. Drivers barely get back up to speed when Kaz Garla loses a wheel and Chase Briscoe goes around which will bring us to the first restart of the day. This team will lose a crew chief and two crew members. We will get another caution due to an entire wheel falling coming off the rim. Then a mini big one happened than involving Harrison Burton were Brad Keselowski was pushing a little too hard. This will include roughly eight cars and will give Martin Truex Jr the stage one win.
Stage two by far has been much calmer of a segment of the race. Greg Biffle did get back out on the track after replacing a fuel line. He is roughly sixty laps down but will still be ahead of those who crashed out at the end of stage one. We do see multiple plenties and or issues from the green flag pit stops. Chase Elliott stalls on pit road and seems to have issues getting the car fired again. Cole Cluster got messages that his car did not take fuel again that it appears something may be broken away from the car. Things will get dicey at the end of stage two as Chase Briscoe tried to stay on the lead lap. Joey Logano used this to get around Brad Keselowski thinking this would give him the win. However, Martin Truex Jr made a last-second move and pull off the stage two win.
We start stage three and seatbelts need to be pulled tight because things will be sure to get entertaining this stage. Drivers are being told already to save as much fuel as possible. Most will be extremely conservative the first part of this run. We will see the change of the drivers driving around fifteen laps to go or less. Most crew chiefs will give a green light around ten for full moves to be made. This will probably be where we see most of the accidents happen or be triggered. We do get a decent size crash with about forty-eight laps to go that caused significant damage or ended the driver’s night. The crash involved Joey Logano, Tyler Reddick, Kurt Busch, Martin Truex Jr, and many others. Things calm down for just a little bit but radios indicate that it may come down to teammates. We come down to fifteen laps to go and you see cars start making some moves. With about thirteen to go, we have another big crash that brings out the red flag for clean-up to persevere laps. This crash involves Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, Noah Gragson, Erik Jones, Kevin Harvick plus additional drivers. Some had minor damage they were able to fix and get back out on the track while we had multiple drivers end up behind the wall. This will trigger multiple restarts and even overtime for NASCAR Great American race. It will come down to blocking and holding on to everything possible. Austin Cindric did exactly that as overtime green flag waved. As drivers were wrecking he pushed just a bit more to keep Bubba Wallace behind him to get the unofficial Daytona 500 win.
