In sequential order, this is how Tyler Reddick won the Daytona 500.
Michael McDowell leads the field back to green. Carson Hocevar takes the lead and holds it at the white. Hocevar gets turned into the wall, contact with Erik Jones and spins across the field, taking Jones and McDowell with him.
No caution.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. took the lead with Chase Elliott to his outside and Reddick to his inside. A damaged William Byron, seeking a third consecutive win, lost the nose and drifted backwards and stalled out Bubba Wallace. Zane Smith sucked up to Elliott and gave him a shove out to the lead.
Riley Herbst sucked up to Reddick, his 23XI Racing teammate, and gave him a shove into Turn 1. Elliott, Smith, Reddick and Herbst single-filed out through the corner. Reddick’s momentum carried him to the outside of Smith and Herbst followed.
This allowed Joey Logano to push Brad Keselowski forward on the outside against the wall. Herbst shaded right and wrecked both of them. On the rebound, Herbst bounced into Elliott and left Reddick unchallenged with it also collected Logano and Stenhouse.
At that point, Reddick and Elliott would have been side-by-side, both without help. Herbst may have successfully gotten the push from Keselowski he needed to surge across the line first, but the shade came too late.
Reddick won the 68th Daytona 500.
Watch: Race Rewind: Chaotic final laps lead to epic finish in Daytona 500
The end result was Reddick celebrating in victory lane with co-owned Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan. Hamlin was involved in a crash earlier in the race. They were the only ones excited about how the finish played out because literally the rest of the top-5 were all sent to infield care because they crashed across the line.
“It’s disappointing,” Elliott said. “I don’t know what to tell you. We were leading the Daytona 500 off Turn 4 coming to the checkered flag and didn’t win, so you tell me.”
Elliott did shade once to stall Reddick but the crossover was not blocked because Elliott felt like that was just going to wreck both of them.
“I felt like the best play for me was to re-rack and get one last shove to the line,” Elliott said. “But that would have been (Herbst) and he wasn’t going to push me (laughs) so … He winds up crashing himself not pushing me which in turn crashed me anyway.
“Maybe I should have just turned left the first time.”
Keselowski was not pleased.
“The 35 just wrecked me out of nowhere for no reason,” Keselowski said. “That was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.
“He had no chance of blocking my run. I had a huge run. I don’t know if I could have gotten the (Reddick) or (Stenhouse) but I would have liked to found out because my run was coming fast and the 35 just wiped us and himself. Pretty stupid.”
Herbst told Bob Pockrass of FOX Sports that it was a split-second decision.
“We got all spread out wide down the back straightaway, and obviously I chose to go with (Reddick), pushed him, and he made that move on (Elliott) to go side-by-side and I don’t know truly what happened,” Herbst told FOX.
Keselowski felt like the amount of ground that Herbst had to cover to get there was just excessive.
“I thought a one-lane block kind of makes sense, but to block from the very bottom all the way to the top and wreck yourself and everybody else is just stupid,” Keselowski said. “Very, very stupid.”
Reddick said Herbst was ‘critical’ to the win from his standpoint.
“I don’t win that race without Riley Herbst,” Reddick said. “That’s a fact. He pushed me to (Smith). I got to (Smith). Now (Elliott) is in front of me, and I make my move.
“I love that he made the move that at the moment was right for him to win the Daytona 500, and I told him that: ‘Man, I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you in the way that you wanted it to,’ but he did — in my opinion, he did everything right on that last lap, as well, pushing me and then doing everything he could to win the race for himself.”
Meanwhile, lost in all the carnage is that Spire Motorsports had two bullets in the chamber lined-up 1-2 and couldn’t close out.
In hindsight, Hocevar felt he kept pushing McDowell too far out front, but that was also what worked for them in the qualifying races on Thursday.
“I was just trying to get us going and it’s just obviously unfortunate,” Hocevar said. “It’s unfortunate that a car in my mirror at the white flag won the race. I felt there was good execution, but it’s just the last lap at Daytona.”
All things considered, Hocevar took it in stride.
“You want to be leading the Daytona 500 and have a shot,” he said. “Everyone cars about this race more than anything and for us to be running 1-2, we’re really proud of this.”
Smith echoed those sentiments, holistically.
“Just a solid points today in general,” Smith said. “But honestly, it’s frustrating right now to have a shot at winning the Daytona 500 and it just not quite happening. I just felt like the run that I had on (Elliott) after pushing him through there, I don’t know if I needed to like back up sooner or what, but wasn’t quite sure like who all was behind me.
“Obviously, all I could see was kind of (Reddick) and my run on (Elliott) just wasn’t big enough to win and I just tried to do all I could but the help wasn’t there.”
And that ended up being that.
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