DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – For perhaps most of the NASCAR Cup Series race at Daytona International Speedway on Saturday, Aug. 23, one could have thrown a blanket on the top five cars.
At the start-finish line, it was no different. Ryan Blaney was only a nose ahead of three other cars to win in a thrilling four-wide drag race to the line. For Blaney, it was business as usual. The Team Penske driver had already won in 2025 and was locked into the NASCAR postseason.
Despite four must-win drivers exchanging the lead with less than eight laps to go, their seasons and their championship hopes ended only a couple feet short of the finish line.
“Yeah, it’s tough,” said Erik Jones, who finished fifth after leading with eight laps to go. “I mean, it is and isn’t disappointing, right? It’s not disappointing because we didn’t win, and we didn’t point our way into this point. That’s on us.
“It is disappointing because we did everything right tonight and put ourselves up front with a chance to win our way in. So, that part makes it way more hard to take than if we would have just wrecked on lap 10.”
With eight laps to go, four of the top five drivers were in must-win situations to advance into the Cup Series playoffs. Jones, Ryan Preece, Justin Haley and Chris Buescher were within eyesight of the lead and the saving of their championship hopes.
Jones had the lead on the restart and found himself having to hold off the bottom lane while protecting the top. For a lap, the bright orange and blue STP No. 43 was in familiar territory – leading at Daytona. Haley was underneath, challenging him in second.
Then he got a hard push from Kyle Larson in third. The sudden move sent Jones out of control into the outside lane. Miraculously, the Michigan native saved the car from certain disaster. However, the damage was done, and Jones was out of the draft. In only moments, the No. 43 fell outside the top 20.
“Yeah, he was shoving pretty hard,” Jones recalled. “He had me out of shape pretty good a couple of times the lap before and then I mean I all but wrecked. I wrecked to the left and kind of gathered it up, and then he shoved me again and took me right and saved that again.
“I’ve never raced with Kyle a lot on the speedways, but I was working really well with everybody else before that, and they had no problems knowing how to push, and I think Kyle knows how to push, and it seemed a little aggressive.”
Larson shared his side of the story as well.
“I’m just trying to hit him and get our lane going,” Larson told media. “I feel like the Ford you can just like really lock onto and push. Toyotas and Chevys, we don’t latch bumpers very well, so I feel like the slams kind of help advance the lane more. Maybe he thinks differently. I did get him a little bit out of shape one time, I think, and then I think that’s when I got by him.
“Dude, you’re just staring at a fucking rear bumper in front of you, you can’t see in front of them, so I’d have to see the replay. If I shoved him into the guy in front of him, I can’t remember.”
But what was lost for The Jones Boy was gained for Preece, who took his No. 60 from the bottom lane to the top and replaced the Legacy Motor Club driver for the top spot. Side-by-side with Haley, Preece was five laps away from his ever-elusive first Cup Series victory.
Alas, as the field came to two laps remaining, Larson and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott pulled out behind the RFK Racing driver of Preece and into the top lane. Alex Bowman, a Hendrick driver that was on the cutline, needed a prior winning driver to win to stay in the playoffs.
All the No. 60 could do is watch as his first win and playoff hopes were swallowed by the pack of cars surrounding him.
“You want to talk about having the best scenario play out for how we wanted it to, I was just leaving the 7 there,” Preece told media post-race. “The 17 was doing a great job just letting them stay there, and there’s nothing you can do. The problem is the 9 and the 5 were worried about their teammate that would have been bumped out.
“I mean we have fast fucking cars, so it pisses me off that this is the second time that we’ve been on the front row with two to go and didn’t win, so we need more friends behind [us].”
With two laps to go, Haley and Larson dueled side-by-side for the race win. Haley, a past winner at Daytona in 2019 with Spire Motorsports, was looking for his first victory in six years.
But there was no way he could have seen the incoming third lane above both he and the No. 5 led by a hard-charging and determined Cole Custer.
One lap earlier, the No. 41 Haas Factory Team car was 12th and sixth in the top lane. However, as the field approached the white flag, Custer, who also hadn’t won a Cup race in over five years, was leading and nobody challenging him on the bottom.
That is until Haley received one last push from Buescher on the bottom. The RFK driver shoved the No. 7 with so much force that Haley cannonballed ahead of Custer and even cleared him on the backstretch.
Custer ducked to the bottom all the way below the yellow line to which Haley followed. Indeed, it was a last act of desperation from two drivers that needed a win to save their seasons.
So, they were likely surprised to see the No. 12 of Blaney sail by on the outside while receiving a push from both Suarez and a miraculously recovered Jones.
“I let the 7 get clear,” Custer said. “But I was so focused on just staying with the 12 because I knew he was going to have the momentum coming to the start-finish line at the end of the race.
“I knew that the top was probably going to win out at the end, so I wanted to stay with him, but the 7 getting clear was definitely what cost us the race, so I wish I kind of maybe combated that a little bit more.”
Coming to the line, it was Custer and Blaney door-to-door for the top spot until both Saurez and Haley started a third and fourth lane mere feet from the line.
Blaney still outran them, while Suarez, Custer, Haley and Jones had to settle for top fives and an elimination from playoff contention.
While no must-win drivers earned a miraculous last-minute win, many displayed a miraculous effort to earn a win when they needed it most, and while Saturday night didn’t go the way they had wished, for some, their herculean efforts improved their morale moving forward.
“Hopefully we can keep doing that,” said Custer, who earned his first Cup Series top five in over five years. “I feel like we’re bringing better and better cars to the racetrack. This is one of the first tracks we’ve been able to come back to as a team for the first time and, you can definitely see that we have some improvements.”
Dalton Hopkins began writing for Frontstretch in April 2021. Currently, he is the lead writer for the weekly Thinkin' Out Loud column, co-host of the Frontstretch Happy Hour podcast, and one of our lead reporters. Beforehand, he wrote for IMSA shortly after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2019. Simultaneously, he also serves as a Captain in the US Army.
Follow Dalton on Twitter @PitLaneCPT