A front-row start. A mid-pack fight. A comeback story.
All three can look identical after 200 miles if the wrong bumper touches at the wrong time, the wrong parts fail or luck isn’t on your side.
The box score says that the three women running in the ARCA Menards Series season opener at Daytona International Speedway wound up with poor finishes. In Saturday’s (Feb. 14) General Tire 200, Taylor Reimer finished 30th, Alli Owens 34th and Isabella Robusto 37th.
Robusto’s path to ARCA has looked like the modern version of a fast track: a young driver with real pace, real structure and real expectations attached. She arrived on the ARCA platform in 2024 and immediately looked comfortable, opening with a sixth-place finish at Phoenix Raceway and later adding her first pole.
She followed that with a full season in 2025 and now steps into 2026 as a championship contender with Nitro Motorsports, driving the No. 55 Mobil 1 Toyota. At Daytona, she looked like a contender. Robusto spent time at the front of the pack and even led 11 laps for the first time in her ARCA career before her afternoon ended prematurely with a transmission failure that sent the car behind the wall — a brutal way for a fast No. 55 to end its race.
“I mean, we had a really fast Mobil 1 Toyota Camry today,” Robusto told Frontstretch. “We were leading a good bit there. Just guess the cards didn’t fall our way. We had some transmission issues that started to pick up there at the end when we were running under the green flag.
“The issue got worse under caution. Tried to come in and fix it but just wasn’t able to get fixed in the time. Really thankful for Toyota, super grateful to race at Daytona — it’s such a cool racetrack. We’ve been fast, just haven’t had the luck that we needed to finish these races.”
When told that her 11 laps led were the most by a woman in ARCA since 1989, she said, “That’s super cool. It’s always really cool to have something like that, but I mean, I wanted to win the last one there.
“We’ll definitely take it where we can get. We got better than we were here last year, which I think is a positive. New team, we’re still trying to get things sorted out, but I’m super proud of my guys who’ve done such a great job all week. And we’ve had a real fast Mobi1 Toyota Camry. We were up front. Even when we went to the back, we made our way back up there fairly quick … I guess we’ll just go get ’em at Phoenix now.”
Even before Daytona, she’d already been part of one of ARCA’s most notable recent milestones: her runner-up finish at the 2024 race at the Illinois State Fairgrounds, with Reimer in third, marked the first time on record that two women finished in the top three in the same ARCA race.
Reimer didn’t arrive at stock cars as a blank slate — she arrived as a dirt racer with a reputation for winning in the kind of places that are loud, tight and unforgiving. She’s from Tulsa, Okla., and started in karting before climbing through Jr. Sprints and micros, piling up wins and championships along the way while becoming the winningest female driver in Port City Raceway history. Nationally, her name jumped another level when she became the first woman with a USAC National Midget feature victory in 2022, a result that immediately stamped her as more than a “first;” it stamped her as someone who can close.
Her ARCA story has been more selective — debuting in 2023 and continuing with occasional starts — but it already has a defining highlight too: Reimer’s third-place run at Springfield in 2024 was part of that same top-three moment alongside Robusto.
Reimer ran consistently inside the top half of the field, and a top-10 finish wasn’t out of the question. A battery issue on her No. 77 Pinnacle Racing Group cost her five laps, a showing not indicative of her performance.
Owens is the outlier in the trio, not because she’s new, but because she’s a returnee. Her first ARCA chapter began in 2008, and over the 2008–10 stretch, she logged more than 30 starts and collected three top-10 finishes before stepping away from racing entirely.
Daytona 2026 was framed as a restart: a mother of three coming back to a platform that looks and races differently than it did when she last ran here. And she did it with a message she’s leaned into all week about perspective, purpose and “drive like a mother.”
Owens put down the 19th-quickest time in the series’ pre-race practice at Daytona, a small stat that still matters when the larger point is simply reacclimating to the draft and the chaos after so many years away.
In the race, her mission to survive was succeeding until the engine on her No. 68 Kimmel Racing Ford expired entering turn 1. She instead left with a torn-up racecar from contact with Sean Corr as a result of the blown motor, with her day ending as she slid down the 24-degree banking.
If you only read the results, it’s easy to miss what the opener actually showed.
Robusto left Daytona with a finish that doesn’t match the speed — and that’s exactly why the speed matters. The No. 55 looked like it belonged at the front, and it ran there until a transmission issue turned a headline into a footnote.
Reimer’s story was quieter but no less familiar to anyone who’s tried to build a racing career the hard way: keep your nose clean, keep learning, put yourself in position and then watch something as small as a battery decide your afternoon.
Owens’ return carried the weight of years, and for a long stretch, it looked like the plan was working — ride, survive, see the checkered — until turn 1 and the banking became the scene of a hard hit and a rough ending.
That’s Daytona, and that’s ARCA’s season-opener reality: the draft gives, the draft takes and the equipment gets the last vote more often than anyone wants to admit.
Three women, three timelines and three races that were more complicated than 30th, 34th and 37th. If the point was to measure progress by one Saturday’s finishing order, the numbers won’t help much. But if the point was to see the breadth of where women are in the ARCA garage right now — leading laps, hanging in the fight and coming back with purpose — the opener gave it, even if it didn’t give any of them the result they came for.
Chris Graham is a motorsports producer, director, and broadcast engineer based in the Philadelphia-area. Through his work with NRN Productions, he’s helped build and execute live race coverage and sports streaming workflows ranging from lean, two-to-three person crews to full broadcast-style productions. Chris has worked across nearly every position in the truck—producing, directing, technical directing, replay, graphics, camera operation, and engineering—and has supported events and partners including FloSports, the ASA STARS National Tour, and Diamond State Digital. He’s also involved in developing live show formats and digital coverage that bring fans closer to the stories behind the racing. He is currently also the producer for the Frontstretch podcast Happy Hour.