Daytona International Speedway is always labeled as one of the chaos-built tracks on the schedule, but we can certainly still be surprised by what we see on the racetrack.
Saturday played host to both the ARCA Menards Series season opener, as well as the Xfinity Series season opener. Both had their fair share of carnage and chaos, although one had more than the other.
We kicked things off with the ARCA race at 12:00PM ET, where the field crashed and went under red flag conditions on the fourth lap of the race. This was followed by various crashed throughout the race, including multiple that collected YouTube star Cleetus McFarland.
Once the field settled down on the crashing and went from 40 to 15 lead-lap cars, former CARS Tour Champion Brenden “Butterbean” Queen was able to get the victory, the first of his young ARCA career.
At 5:00ET we rolled out the Xfinity Series cars in hopes of a cleaner race, yet the beginning was not that whatsoever. Brandon Jones, Carson Kvapil, and Daniel Dye all wrecked out in the opening 10 laps due to a bad push.
Austin Hill was the dominant car per usual, as he is always a favorite during our race picks segment on The Afternoon Underdogs, but he was only as good as his car as unfortunately the No. 21 experienced a mechanical issue and they were out of the race in a snap of a finger.
The race stayed relatively calm until the final few laps, where a crash involving top NASCAR prospect Connor Zilisch took place, setting up an overtime restart.
In the end, it was the youngster for Richard Childress Racing Jesse Love hanging on to grab the victory as the entire field crashed behind him.
Just in the snap of a finger we have had five races take place at Daytona this weekend, and it all leads up to the Daytona 500 on Sunday afternoon, where President Trump will be arriving to the World Center of Racing for the second time as President of the United States.
