After receiving a shove to the front from a fellow young driver in the final half lap, Harrison Burton held off Kyle Busch to the checkered flag to win the co*ke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona, picking up his first NASCAR Cup Series win and the 100th win in the history of Wood Brothers Racing. Burton capitalized from the front of the outside lane on an overtime restart, surging to the lead after a push from Parker Retzlaff before fending off Kyle Busch to make it to the finish line first.
Burton's upset victory has massive consequences for the NASCAR playoffs, as he launches from deep in the points standings after a difficult 2024 season all the way to the No. 13 seed in the playoffs. As a result, Burton bumps both Bubba Wallace (-21) and Ross Chastain (-27) below the cut line, with Chris Buescher (+21) tentatively holding the final playoff spot heading into the the regular season finale at Darlington.
co*ke Zero Sugar 400 unofficial results
- #21 - Harrison Burton
- #8 - Kyle Busch
- #20 - Christopher Bell
- #15 - Cody Ware
- #54 - Ty Gibbs
- #23 - Bubba Wallace
- #62 - Parker Retzlaff
- #6 - Brad Keselowski
- #31 - Daniel Hemric
- #17 - Chris Buescher
Burton, the son of longtime NASCAR driver Jeff Burton, moved to the Cup Series in 2022 as a hot young prospect after winning four times in the NASCAR Xfinity Series. But in 96 starts for the storied Wood Brothers, he had little success -- just a single top five and only five top 10s -- prompting the Wood Brothers to hire Josh Berry for 2025 and put Burton in the free agent pool for next season.
Now, Burton's season -- and career -- changes completely with a win at Daytona.
"I cried the whole victory lap," Burton told NBC Sports. "I obviously got fired from this job, and I wanted to do everything for the Wood Brothers that I could. They've given me an amazing opportunity in life, and to get them (win) 100 on my way out is amazing. We're in the playoffs now, let's go to Darlington and see what happens."
Burton becomes the 12th driver in history to earn his first Cup win in the co*ke Zero Sugar 400, a list that includes A.J. Foyt (1964), John Andretti (1997), Greg Biffle (2003) and William Byron (2020). He also becomes the third member of the Burton family to win a race at Daytona, joining his father Jeff -- who won this race back in 2000 -- as well as uncle and 2002 Daytona 500 champion Ward Burton.
Jeff Burton, now a broadcaster for NBC Sports, congratulated his son over the radio from the broadcast booth before making his way to the Daytona trioval to offer a more personal congratulations.
In addition, Burton joins a select group of drivers who have earned their first career victory driving for the Wood Brothers, joining team patriarch Glen Wood, Tiny Lund, Kyle Petty, Dale Jarrett, Elliott Sadler, Trevor Bayne and Ryan Blaney. Of that group, Lund and Bayne's first wins also came at Daytona in the 1963 and 2011 Daytona 500s respectively.
Fly by Night
One year after Ryan Preece went for a violent tumble through the Daytona infield in this race, and just one week after both the Cup and Xfinity Series races at Michigan saw cars go airborne and land on their roofs, NASCAR had entered Daytona weekend hoping to mitigate the chances of such spectacular wrecks happening, introducing a new right side "shark fin" to the rear window of each car while also paving over the portion of the Daytona backstretch where Preece's car flipped one year ago.
The results turned out to be rather uneven, highlighting the dangers of superspeedway racing and continuing an alarming August trend of cars going up and over.
The initial incident of concern came with nine laps to go, when Michael McDowell was spun from the race lead entering turn 1 after receiving a bad push from Austin Cindric behind him. McDowell's car spun in front of traffic before being hit by Joey Logano, launching the car airborne momentarily -- damaging the C-pillar of Alex Bowman's car in mid-flight -- before settling down on its wheels and backing into the outside wall.
There was some initial reassurance that perhaps NASCAR's new safety device helped lessen the severity of the crash given that McDowell's car came back down to Earth. But that optimism dissipated with two laps to go, when another crash between Cindric and Josh Berry while racing for the lead saw Berry's car go airborne, flip over, and then hit the inside wall head on before coming to rest upside down.
After his car was put back on its wheels by safety crews, Berry was able to climb out uninjured. But the problem of four airborne cars in two weeks' time -- and two alone in Saturday night's race -- will do nothing for the nerves of NASCAR's Research & Development Center, who will likely be tasked with further efforts to prevent such accidents from occuring by the time the Cup Series heads to its other superspeedway at Talladega in October.
Bubble Buster
Entering the night, the drivers on the bubble of making the NASCAR playoffs had two main objectives: Run up front, try to avoid any big wrecks, and hope and pray that someone from below the cut line doesn't pull off a win and completely rock their worlds. Unfortunately for Bubba Wallace and Ross Chastain, that's exactly what ended up happening.
For much of the race, Chastain looked to be in deep trouble after being spun to trigger an 18-car crash on the backstraightaway, but he was able to eventually get back on the lead lap and stay in the draft despite heavy front end damage to his car. That put him in position to capitalize when both Wallace and Chris Buescher were involved in the 14-car crash with nine laps to go, but both Wallace and Buescher were able to battle back for top 10 finishes, mitigating Chastain's gains as he finished 12th.
However, Burton's win now bumps the cut line further down, giving Buescher just a 21 point advantage over Wallace and a 27-point edge on Chastain entering the final race of the regular season next weekend. Instead of leaving Daytona with a six-point edge on Chastain for the final playoff spot, Wallace now finds himself in a deep points hole, and was enormously self-critical with a Southern 500 win now his best -- and perhaps only -- chance of making the playoffs for a second-straight year.
As for Kyle Busch, he went from potentially winning Daytona -- and erasing an entire season's worth of misfortune with an automatic playoff spot -- to in a do-or-die scenario at Darlington to avoid missing the playoffs for the first time since 2012 and the first time since NASCAR's current elimination playoff format was introduced in 2014.
"I mean, we want to," Busch said when asked by NBC Sports if he could win the Southern 500. "We ran good there the first time I ran with these guys early last year. But earlier this year we struggled mightily. We'll just have to go with hopefully a really good package that works, get our job done."
Race results rundown
- Saturday was a night to remember for Rick Ware Racing, with the small but growing team putting in perhaps the best performance in its history. Justin Haley led 21 laps, the most the team has ever led in a single race, before being taken out with nine laps to go and passing the baton off to Cody Ware, who would run in the draft of Busch and Bell on the final restart all the way to a career-best fourth place finish. Ware's best career finish also ties the best finish in team history, which was set by David Ragan in the 2020 Daytona 500 in a collaboration with Front Row Motorsports.
- In just his second career Cup start, Parker Retzlaff made the difference in Burton's victory by pushing him out front on the last lap before earning a seventh-place finish for himself. Retzlaff's top 10 is the seventh in team history for Beard Motorsports, but it came after Retzlaff defied team orders not to push Burton to the win. Retzlaff was allegedly told over his team radio before the final restart not to push Burton's Ford, as Beard Motorsports gets its motors from ECR, the same company that provides the horsepower for Kyle Busch.
- We've found Daniel Hemric's ceiling! Hemric earned his fourth top 10 finish of the 2024 season by crossing the finish line in ninth, with all four top 10s being ninth-place finishes. Hemric also finished ninth at Talladega, Dover, and Nashville.
- For the second week in a row, Spire Motorsports rookie teammates finished inside the top 15, with Carson Hocevar crossing the finish line in 11th just ahead of Zane Smith in 13th, who is now looking for a ride for 2025 after being released from his contract to drive for Trackhouse Racing in the future. Hocevar now has an average finish of 10.25 over the past four races, as he has earned two top 10 finishes and has finished better than 12th in each race since Indianapolis.
- Some part-time teams enjoyed top 20 finishes, as B.J. McLeod took his independently-owned Live Fast Motorsports Chevrolet to a 19th place finish while Joey Gase drove the NY Racing No. 44 to a 20th place finish. For Gase, that 20th place run ties the best finish in team history for NY Racing, a mark originally set by Greg Biffle at Atlanta in 2022.
- Two Trackhouse Racing drivers both experienced massive mechanical failures, with the first and most frightening being Daniel Suarez, whose car caught fire under the first caution of the race, relegating him to a 40th place finish. Later on, Shane van Gisbergen -- who announced Saturday he will move up to full-time Cup racing in 2025 -- had a massive engine failure on the backstretch before a much smaller pit road fire. Van Gisbergen would finish 35th, one of 15 cars that failed to finish.
