NNS: Stewart Wins Daytona Opener In Wild Finish

The benefits of drafting at Daytona International Speedway were clearly defined again Saturday as Tony Stewart used a final-stretch push from Landon Cassill to win the DRIVE4COPD 300 Nationwide Series opener.

Slapped by a flat tire with 14 laps to go, Stewart was in 11th when the race restarted with six laps remaining. He and Cassill, scheduled to drive part-time this season for Phoenix Racing, linked up in a torrid draft and swept toward the front.

They caught the drafting pair of Bowyer and Dale Earnhardt Jr. with three laps to go and moved in beside them exiting the fourth turn on the last lap.

With Cassill pushing, Stewart edged past Bowyer on the outside by a few feet at the finish line. It was Stewart’s fourth straight win in the Nationwide season-opener at Daytona.

Cassill took third, Earnhardt Jr. fourth and Reed Sorenson fifth.

“We knew we had a good enough car to do it,” Stewart said. “The good thing was the Gibbs cars (Joey Logano and Kyle Busch) were separated. It gave us a chance to get with Landon Cassill and get a good run to the front.

“I got to watch him (Cassill) a lot, seeing what a good job he was doing. We knew he had speed. I could tell he had good control. I had a lot of confidence in him going into that last stretch.”

Stewart won the race by .007 of a second, the closest finish in Nationwide history at Daytona and the third closest finish in the series since electronic scoring debuted in the 1990s.

The race’s first of several big crashes happened on lap 17 as Brian Scott, trapped in a big pack of traffic, was tapped from the rear and sent spinning across the grass adjacent to the trioval.

During the round of pit stops that followed the caution flag, Earnhardt Jr., driving No. 5, missed his pit because he was looking for the pit sign for 88, his Sprint Cup number. “My bad,” Earnhardt Jr. radioed to his crew.

Several laps later, another crash sent six cars, including those of Michael Annett, Elliott Sadler and Todd Bodine, spinning across the track.

Sadler, a preseason championship favorite, got the worst of the wreck. “I looked up, and the 62 (Michael Annett) was sideways,” Sadler said.

On lap 30, Danica Patrick, riding a draft with Kyle Busch, sprinted to first place as the front group swept across the finish line. She lost the draft that she and Bowyer had built, however, and eventually finished 14th.

Bowyer pushed Patrick into first place, but when it came time for the pair to swap positions so that Bowyer could cool his engine, Patrick did not respond appropriately. She asked for help from her spotter.

Bowyer said he was upset at the moment but was able to joke about the problem after the race.

“I pushed her until I got hot, and I had to switch,” he said. “I was yelling at my spotter. Find her spotter. I guess he didn’t think she needed to be doing that. He wouldn’t pay attention. I told him to throw him off the roof, get a new spotter.”

After the race’s third caution flag, which appeared because of a second spin by Sam Hornish Jr., Kasey Kahne was blackflagged for passing before the start-finish line as the green flag was unfurled. He fell from seventh place to 20th, a lap down.

On lap 106, contact with Cassill in a pack of traffic sent Brad Keselowski’s Dodge spinning off the track and onto the frontstretch apron grass. The car turned back onto the track and into the path of Josh Wise, who slammed Keselowski. The crash caused an extended caution period and a five-minute red flag.

Cassill leaves the first race of the season with the Nationwide points lead, but he doesn’t have a ride for the second event of the year next week at Phoenix.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including “NASCAR: The Definitive History of America’s Sport” and “Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told”. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.