Mississippi native Stenhouse Jr. gets Daytona 500 win

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Mississippi native Ricky Stenhouse Jr. has had a roller coaster career in which he had to fight to keep a job, lost his seat at a NASCAR powerhouse team and opened his 14th season mired in a five-year losing streak.

To say this Daytona 500 was a milestone race was an understatement — for Stenhouse and for NASCAR.

Stenhouse won the Daytona 500 in double overtime and under caution Sunday night in the longest running of “The Great American Race.”the two overtimes pushed the 65th running of the race to a record 212 laps — a dozen laps beyond the scheduled distance and a whopping 530 miles (850 km).

It provided anxious moments before a landmark celebration: the first Daytona 500-winning team co-owned by a Black man and a woman.

Stenhouse's win for JTG Daugherty Racing was the third of his career. JTG is the first single-car team to win the Daytona 500 since The Wood Brothers Racing did it with Trevor Bayne in 2011.

The team is owned by Tad and Jodi Geschickter along with former NBA player Brad Daugherty.

Daugherty, who left the track earlier Sunday with an eye irritation, is the first Black car owner to win the race, and Jodi Geschickter joined Teresa Earnhardt as female car owners to win the Daytona 500. Earnhardt ran Dale Earnhardt Inc. when Michael Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt Jr. won the Daytona 500 in 2003 and 2004.

To get to victory lane Sunday, JTG stuck with Stenhouse and even reunited him this season with the crew chief who led him to a pair of Xfinity Series titles years ago.

Mike Kelly's biggest task was convincing Stenhouse that he can indeed win races. So ahead of the Daytona 500, he taped a note inside the Chevrolet. The message? The team believes in the driver.

“When I woke up today I told myself that I was going to do something that I used to do for Ricky when we had tough days,” Kelly said. “I just wrote him a note that only he would see. It was on top of the roll bar in front of him, and it just said, ‘We believe.' That's been our motto the whole offseason — that we believe.

“We're trying to get people to believe in Ricky Stenhouse Jr. again.”