NASCAR: Winners and losers of the 2023 Daytona 500

NASCAR’s winners and three losers in the 2023 Daytona 500

Winner: Ricky Stenhouse Jr.

This one is an obvious one, but of course, Stenhouse falls under this category.

A veteran of over a decade in the Cup Series, Stenhouse has been dominant at superspeedways over the course of his career, seemingly always being up front at the end of the races.

In the Daytona 500 specifically, this was only the second top-10 for him. However, in the Summer Daytona races, he has a victory and another top-five. At Talladega, he also has one victory and has a whopping nine top-10 finishes over the course of his career.

Some guys get it done on road courses, some get it done on mile-and-a-half tracks. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. gets it done on superspeedways.

Loser: Stewart-Haas Racing

It’s hard to hand a full organization a “loss” but SHR had an extremely poor showing at this year’s Daytona 500. All races at Daytona and Talladega are wild cards where anyone can win. However, three of the four SHR cars finished outside of the top-20, including Chase Briscoe and Ryan Preece who finished 35th and 36th, respectively.

SHR made some changes in the 2022-2023 offseason, switching out Cole Custer for Preece, so let’s hope that Preece’s finish in the Daytona 500 is not an indicator of what’s to come for the organization who has shown that it can win races in the not-so-distant past.