Ryan Preece led five laps of the Coke Zero Sugar 400 on Saturday night. Austin Cindric led six. Neither of them was in the playoff when the race started at Daytona International Speedway, and both of them are in it now.
The Cup Series playoff, which NASCAR calls the Chase, is sixteen drivers over ten races, and Saturday night was the last chance to get into it. Preece got in by winning. Cindric got in by finishing sixth and keeping the fifteenth place in the standings he had walked in with. Shane Van Gisbergen got knocked out.
Now look at who actually led the race.
Austin Hill led 27 laps, more than anyone. He scored nothing for it, because he is eligible for points in the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, where he is fifth in the standings, and not in this one. He finished 27th, the same arrangement that left Corey Heim with zero Cup points after winning the Brickyard 400 in July. Chase Elliott led 19 in three separate runs and finished 23rd. William Byron led 14 straight and finished 22nd. Ross Chastain started from the pole, led 12, and finished 24th. Zane Smith led laps 154 through 165, which is to say he was leading with two laps to go after the race had run past its scheduled distance into overtime, and he crashed and was scored 32nd. Ryan Blaney, who won at Atlanta in overtime in July, crashed too, and so did Ty Gibbs, and both finished behind him.
The lead changed 41 times among 22 different drivers. Twelve of them led more laps than Preece. ONE of the twelve finished in the top ten, and that was Cindric, with six.
Now compare that with the last time this series ran somewhere a fast car gets paid. In July, Joey Logano led 323 laps at North Wilkesboro and won. The win was the consequence of the afternoon. He had the best car, he led nearly all of it, and the finishing order was a fair record of what had happened. Nothing about Saturday night worked that way. At Daytona the running order is a photograph of one instant, and the only instant that pays is the last one.
Derrick Finley, Preece's crew chief, was asked afterward what his team had told itself going in.
"We called it before this. We're going to go out, try to win every stage, lead every lap, win the race."
Stages are the scored segments a Cup race is divided into, and the top ten in each earn bonus points. Preece's team won none of them and led three percent of the race. They went one for four on their own plan and got the one that pays.
Here is what they actually did. Preece was in the wreck that ended the first stage on the frontstretch, and the car came out of it, in Finley's words, "still basically in one piece." They repaired it and then pitted earlier than they should have been able to afford on fuel. When the third caution flag flew on lap 156 it stayed out for nine laps, roughly twice as long as Finley said he expected, and the end of the race became a question of whether there was enough left in the tank to still be running when it went back to green.
"The problem was if we came down later, we'd already given up all that track position if those guys pitted right away," Finley said. "Ryan did a great job saving under caution, shutting the car off, coasting, doing all the stuff you do to save fuel. We made it."
It went green for two laps. Preece went three-wide on the last one with cars spinning alongside and behind him, and he was in front of Daniel Suarez when the caution came out again. The race ended under that caution, so the official margin of victory is not a time. It reads "Under Caution."
It is his first points-paying win in the Cup Series, one night after Ryan Sieg took his first O'Reilly Series win in 424 starts on the same racetrack and missed that series' playoff anyway. "This is redemption," Preece said on the frontstretch, and then, about the previous season: "There were a lot of keyboard warriors saying I was nothing. Well, we just kicked their butts tonight."
It was Finley's first too. He has been crew chiefing in the Cup Series on and off since 2003, and had won races as an operations director and as a competition director, but never once from the pit box. He got there by telling his driver to shut the engine off and coast.
Then there is Cindric, who did the opposite thing on the same racetrack on the same night. He ran tenth in the first stage, thirteenth in the second and sixth in the race, and at no point did he give anybody a reason to watch him. Asked how the closing laps felt, he said: "Honestly, less [dramatic] than you'd think."
Van Gisbergen did neither thing. He won the first stage, the first stage he has ever won on an oval, and went into the night with a 31-point cushion on Preece for the last playoff place. He finished 28th once the crashing started.
"Congrats to the 60," he said, meaning Preece's car. "But one night doesn't sum up our year. I guess we haven't been good enough."
He is right about the year and it does not matter, and that is not unfairness. Daytona was never going to measure anybody's season. What it measures is whether you are in position when the accounting stops, and there were exactly two ways to be in position on Saturday. Preece took the violent one. Cindric took the boring one. Van Gisbergen, who beat both of them to the end of the first stage, took neither, and a stage win is not a position.
The sixteen who made it are reset into a single 100-point band, Denny Hamlin on top at 2,100 and Preece on the bottom at 2,000, with Cindric five points above him. Ten races to sort that out, starting Sunday at Darlington. Preece goes into them seeded last, one hundred points behind Hamlin and one lap better than the alternative.