Just after various discouraging finishes, Tony Stewart finally received at NASCAR’s most well known observe. Stewart dominated the rain-delayed Pepsi 400 previous calendar year, but still essential a spectacular 4-vast move to move towards the front, then pulled away on the restart with nine laps remaining to seal his very first Nextel Cup victory in 14 starts off at Daytona Global Speedway. Winning this race for the Daytona five hundred or on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the greatest earn a driver could at any time have Stewart explained. But Stewart will settle for this for now, he celebrated by climbing the fence in to the flag stand to assert the checkered flag. It had been his next consecutive victory and confirmed the 2002 sequence champion can nonetheless be considered a contender. He begun from the pole, led a race-record 151 of one hundred sixty laps, and moved to 3rd while in the standings Daytona Global Speedway opened in 1959, but the historical past of automobile racing at Daytona goes again A lot farther than that. In 1936, the precursor to today’s Daytona 500 was born on a training course that went down one.five miles of freeway.
William H.G. France, a mechanic and racer who’d moved south from Washington, D.C., at some point took about The work of running the beach races on the second of two programs applied for all those functions. In 1947, he presided around a gathering at Daytona’s Streamline Lodge exactly where NASCAR was born.
Ten years later, France started working on his showplace. “Big Bill” France was setting up it, he insisted on 31-degree banking from the corners. That’s as steep as he could make the turns and nonetheless keep the machines putting down the asphalt from tipping about.
When drivers collected for the very first Daytona five hundred, it absolutely was an eye fixed-popping working experience. Drivers were being extra accustomed to 50 %-mile Grime tracks and observed the one.366-mile paved track at Darlington.
Bob Welborn ran one hundred forty.121 mph to acquire the pole for the 1st Daytona 500, and Lee Petty received 온라인바카라 in a photo complete above Johnny Beauchamp. It was at Daytona Global Speedway the place Junior Johnson uncovered that if he tucked his motor vehicle right driving A further just one, he could go quicker than he could operate by himself. And drafting became a Portion of the sport.