Newman drives really, really fast to win Daytona 500

DAYTONA BEACH, FL — Joe Gibbs Racing, DEI, and the favored Hendrick Motorsports cars were all pretty fast on Sunday, but not fast enough to catch lightning fast Ryan Newman of the generally pretty fast Penske Racing, who won his team’s – and his own – first Daytona 500 after a little bit of help from super fast teammate Kurt Busch on the last lap.

“It was an amazing race we ran today, but I couldn’t have done it without Kurt,” said Newman, while celebrating in victory road. “This is a day I’ll never forget. It just feels incredible to win.”

Busch was excited after the race, too. Though he was comfortable with his own level of fastness, he was more than happy to sacrifice a potential victory of his own to bump his teammate to certain victory.

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“After yesterday’s qualifier, we knew that our cars would all go really fast,” said Busch, who ended up being extremely fast. “I was intensely quick yesterday, but it dawned on me on the last lap that if I got behind him and pushed, Ryan would almost surely take it to that next level – really, really fast; extremely fast, even. So that’s what I did. It’s all about the team at Penske.”

“While I’m disappointed with our finish, I know Ryan is a good guy and I’m happy for him and his crew. We had a good, fast car out there today, and I knew we would go damn fast,” commented an exhausted Dale Earnhardt, Jr., one of the most popular and fastest drivers in NASCAR. “But Ryan was going insanely fast at the end there. We really could only go really fast, maybe wildly fast at the fastest. But after you’ve been doing this as long as I have, when you see someone going insanely fast and you’re only going wildly fast… Well, that’s no different than if someone is lightning quick and he’s trying to run down someone who is super speedy. Or someone who is super fast trying to catch someone who is quick as the devil. I think you take my point.”

“You wake up on Daytona morning, and you just want to be fast, if you can,” said Newman, who was the very picture of honor in victory. “You don’t even dream about being super fast. You never think about being insanely fast, and you certainly don’t think about being wildly fast.

“Okay, I take that back – you do think about being insanely fast, but then you check yourself, and you realize that in this world you can really only hope to be super fast or really fast, but that a guy can dream, right? Or maybe not, maybe you just decide that you’ll take your lightning quick days, and your super speedy days, and your really fast days and you’ll see if you can put them together for a career.”

Many teams were looking forward to heading back to their respective garages this week to figure out ways to make their cars go really, really fast – maybe even unbelievably fast – at next week’s NASCAR event at the California Speedway.