Ryan Preece won his first NASCAR Cup Series race by four one-hundredths of a second, a margin thin enough that it barely registers as a gap. His 0.024-second decision over Daniel Suárez in Saturday night’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 stands as the tightest finish of the year at Daytona International Speedway, settled on the sixth lap of overtime after Carson Hocevar’s spin sent the field into an extra round. But the number that actually reshaped NASCAR’s Chase picture wasn’t the margin of victory. It was the 31-point cushion Shane van Gisbergen brought into the night for the Cup Series’ final Chase transfer spot, and how fast it evaporated once his crew chief had to start doing fuel math.
The fuel math that beat him
Van Gisbergen didn’t lose the last Chase berth by getting outdriven. He lost it because his No. 97 Chevrolet couldn’t cover the same distance on a tank of fuel as the Fords running up front. When a Lap 155 caution bunched the field for a cleanup, crew chief Stephen Doran made the defensible call to pit for gas rather than risk running dry with a Chase spot on the line, which sent van Gisbergen to a 27th-place restart. Doran later said the team simply “chose to pit and be on offense” rather than gamble on making it to the finish. It was the correct call in isolation and the costly one relative to Preece, who stretched his own fuel window all the way to the white flag and drove past Zane Smith for the lead with ten laps left in regulation.
Preece finished the night with 67 points earned to van Gisbergen’s 19, a 48-point swing that flipped their 31-point gap into a 17-point cushion running the other way. Doran was candid that Daytona was a symptom rather than the disease: his cars have given up ground on fuel mileage most of the season, a gap he pointed to specifically on intermediate tracks. All three Trackhouse Racing entries — van Gisbergen, Ross Chastain and Connor Zilisch — missed the Chase field entirely, a rough return for a season that included two van Gisbergen wins.
A journeyman finally cashes in
Preece is 35, still runs a Whelen Modified Tour schedule most Cup regulars would never attempt, and has spent the better part of a decade cycling through Hyak Motorsports (formerly JTG Daugherty Racing) equipment and a since-shuttered Stewart-Haas Racing ride before landing his current seat at RFK Racing. He had never won a Cup points race before Saturday, and the only other Cup victory on his résumé, this year’s Cook Out Clash, is an exhibition that pays no points at all. Backfire tracked exactly how much racing Preece was cramming into bubble week, and the payoff for all those laps was a win that came the hard way, collected in someone else’s mess during Stage 1, dropped to 38th to start Stage 2, and still angry enough to run the field down twice.
Daytona hasn’t always been kind to him. He flipped hard in this same race in 2023 and rolled at last year’s Daytona 500, which made Saturday’s burnout and long-delayed trip to Victory Lane look less like a breakthrough and more like an overdue correction. Preece joked afterward that his “knuckles would be pretty tore up” from the fight for position, which is as fair a summary of his whole Cup career as any.
What the result means for the field
RFK Racing now sends two cars into the Chase, Preece and Chris Buescher, who had locked in his own spot weeks earlier, while co-owner Brad Keselowski’s entry missed the field entirely, a reminder that running a multi-car operation doesn’t guarantee your own name makes the cut. Denny Hamlin carries the No. 1 seed into the Chase opener on the strength of four wins and the kind of steady finishes Backfire broke down after New Hampshire. Hocevar’s spin that triggered Saturday’s overtime was itself a fitting bookend to how he clinched his own Chase spot a few weeks earlier. And the bubble fight that Joey Logano and others waged all August finally has its answer, decided by a fuel window instead of a photo finish.
What to watch next
The obvious question entering the Chase opener is whether Preece’s short-track instincts and superspeedway timing translate to the intermediate ovals that make up most of the Round of 16, the same tracks where Doran admits his own cars are still chasing fuel mileage. Preece’s career results away from superspeedways are thin, so the more interesting story may be whether RFK’s two-car strength can back each other up strategically in ways Trackhouse couldn’t on Saturday. And keep an eye on Trackhouse itself: an oh-for-three Chase miss for an ownership group that has spent three years building toward exactly this kind of run is the sort of quiet, expensive disappointment that tends to surface in driver-market chatter by autumn.
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