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Rookie Austin Cindric won the 2022 Daytona 500 in his eighth Cup Series start.
Cindric was able to stay ahead of Team Penske teammate Ryan Blaney on the race’s green-white-checker two-lap restart to win over Bubba Wallace. Blaney got into the wall as Cindric blocked him before the checkered flag and a crash broke out behind the leaders after they crossed the finish line.
Fittingly, the race was dominated by teams and manufacturers working together. Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota teams coordinated their pit stops as much as possible to work with cars from their own manufacturer.
And Ford had been the team that did it best throughout the weekend. Ford cars won the qualifying races on Thursday after pit calls during the green-flag pit stops during each race put small packs of Fords out front.
Fords finished in five of the top six starting positions and seven of the top 10. Cindric jumped out ahead of Blaney as the green flag waved for the final time and then used pushes from Blaney over the last two laps to stay ahead of former Team Penske driver Brad Keselowski as he tried to get a push from Chase Briscoe over the final two laps.
The race was red-flagged with nine laps to go after a wreck involving Kevin Harvick, Kyle Larson and others. Larson had a drafting run on Harvick in the trioval while Chris Buescher was a tad slower than both Harvick and Larson at the front of the outside line. Harvick had nowhere to go when he got a shove from Larson and his car went sideways into Noah Gragson’s to trigger a multi-car crash.
That set up a restart that led to the second crash triggered by a Keselowski push. Keselowski was second in line on the outside behind Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and pushed Stenhouse through Turn 4 after the restart. That push got Stenhouse loose and he hit Wallace and collected Keselowski’s teammate Chris Buescher.
The crash that led to the red flag happened after a wreck in the second stage ruined Joey Logano and Kurt Busch’s chances at a win. The second stage crash happened after Tyler Reddick’s car got loose exiting Turn 4 and went around after getting tagged by a laps-down Jacques Villeneuve.
The first stage ended under caution after a scary crash involving Harrison Burton, William Byron and three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin. Burton’s car slid into Byron’s after an aggressive push from Keselowski and sent Byron’s car into the inside wall on the backstretch. Burton’s car flipped over after it got turned around, though it quickly landed back on its wheels and Burton was uninjured.
Who is Austin Cindric?
Cindric’s win continues a trend of unlikely Daytona 500 winners. Austin Dillon got his first Cup Series win in 2018 on the last lap of the Daytona 500 and Michael McDowell took advantage of a crash between Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski as they battled for the lead on the final lap to win the 2021 Daytona 500.
The 2020 Xfinity Series champion is the son of Team Penske executive Tim Cindric and made his first NASCAR national series start in 2015 as a 16-year-old in the Truck Series. Cindric ran full-time in the Truck Series in 2017 and got his first NASCAR win that year at Mosport.
He moved to the Xfinity Series full-time in 2018 for Team Penske and finished eighth in the Cup Series standings. He won two races in 2019 and then won six races in 2020 on his way to the championship.
Cindric almost went back-to-back in the Xfinity Series in 2021 but was passed on the final lap in a door-banging finish by Daniel Hemric in the winner-take-all final race of the season.
That race came after Cindric had been announced as the driver of the No. 2 car in the Cup Series in 2022. Cindric was tabbed to replace Keselowski at Team Penske after the 2012 champion left Penske for a minority stake in what’s now Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing.
An understandably annoyed Stenhouse made sure to note that the car that Keselowski used to drive was in victory lane the year after he left.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was critical of Brad Keselowski pushing in the corner. Stenhouse: “I guess he just tried to wreck everybody in the field until he won. I guess his other car won that he gave up. So kudos to him.” pic.twitter.com/lf5QMX0Tn4
— Bob Pockrass (@bobpockrass) February 21, 2022
While Cindric’s win Sunday night may be a bit of a surprise, it won’t be a surprise if he gets another win this season. Cindric is an accomplished road racer who has scored five of his 13 Xfinity Series wins on road courses. He should be extremely competitive on the six road course races looming on the 2022 Cup Series schedule.
Sunday also means he’s locked into the Cup Series playoffs unless 17 or more drivers win races in the regular season and Cindric is not among the top 16 of those winners in the points standings. That latter scenario is highly unlikely; there has never been a season since NASCAR expanded the playoffs to 16 drivers where more than 16 have won a race in the first 26 races of the season.
New car still working out the flaws
It was not a flawless debut for NASCAR’s new car design, though that was to be expected. Sunday’s race was the first points race for NASCAR’s revamped Cup Series cars and it showed that there are still some kinks to work out.
Burton’s car got airborne extremely quick during his crash. As soon as his car did more than a 90-degree turn and his spoiler started facing forward the car lifted off. NASCAR tries to keep its cars as glued to the ground as possible and will likely be examining the crash and Burton’s car to see why it flipped over like it did.
Cars were also getting stuck when they got flat tires. Both Joey Logano and Alex Bowman had cars that were unable to move when the tires went flat because the cars and the new rear diffusers underneath them are so low to the ground. It’s hard to fathom how NASCAR and its car designers didn’t foresee flat tires causing issues like that.
Additionally, there were two wheel-centric issues during the race. Kaz Grala had a wheel come completely off his car on a pit stop and Justin Haley also had a wheel problem. The new Cup Series cars have a single stud attachment on the hubs like IndyCar cars do. Previous Cup Series cars had multiple lug nuts that crew members had to attach on each wheel during pit stops.
Fox’s coverage continues to be abysmal
Fox flubbed its coverage of the biggest race of the year. Three-time Cup Series champion Tony Stewart was an excellent guest analyst and provided timely insight — he even predicted that Cindric was the driver to watch halfway through the race.
Outside of Stewart, viewers were failed by Fox in myriad ways. The network took way too long to accurately explain what happened during the wreck at the end of the first stage as it unfolded while Fox was showing viewers at home a bumper camera.
Fox’s ticker was an absolute mess, as well. It didn’t show intervals throughout the field for the majority of the race, leaving viewers to wonder how far back drivers outside of the main camera shots were. As some drivers fell a lap or more back, Fox’s leaderboard did not tell fans how many laps back those drivers were. It instead rotated through live speeds — largely irrelevant at a track like Daytona — and car manufacturers instead of showing viewers useful information.
The coverage was the continuation of Fox’s downward spiral in quality. The network was revolutionary when it started broadcasting NASCAR in 2001 and helped bring NASCAR into the mainstream. But now its broadcasts fail to inform viewers of even basic facts and its cameras can’t even capture all of the action at an event as large as the Daytona 500; Grala’s wheel coming off was never shown to viewers at home.
Race results
1. Austin Cindric
2. Bubba Wallace
3. Chase Briscoe
4. Ryan Blaney
5. Aric Almirola
6. Kyle Busch
7. Michael McDowell
8. David Rogan
9. Brad Keselowski
10. Chase Elliott
11. Ty Dillon
12. Daniel Hemric
13. Martin Truex Jr.
14. Corey LaJoie
15. Landon Cassill
16. Chris Buescher
17. Cody Ware
18. Daniel Suarez
19. Kurt Busch
20. Cole Custer
21. Joey Logano
22. Jacques Villeneuve
23. Justin Haley
24. Alex Bowman
25. Austin Dillon
26. Kaz Grala
27. BJ McLeod
28. Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
29. Erik Jones
30. Kevin Harvick
31. Noah Gragson
32. Kyle Larson
33. Todd Gilliland
34. Christopher Bell
35. Tyler Reddick
36. Greg Biffle
37. Denny Hamlin
38. William Byron
39. Harrison Burton
40. Ross Chastain