Ryan Newman News and Information

Photos From Yahoo! Sports
Click on the pics and go see them at the site.

That’s right. Ryan Newman has won the 50th running of the Daytona 500 snapping a 81 winless steak.

Penske, the most successful owner in open wheel history with 14 wins in the prestigious Indianapolis 500, now has a victory in NASCAR’s showcase event.

It only took him 23 years to get it.

Newman ran up front in the top 10 and top 5 for the last half of the race. With 3 laps to go the green flag was dropped after a caution. On restart Burton led the field but did not stay in first for long. He immediatly starting dropping back. Newman and Stewart split Burton. Newman went high and Stewart low. Newman ended up pushing the heck out of Tony and eventually launching Tony a little farther ahead of him.

Tony decided to go back low and jump in front of Kyle Busch, his teammate. What Stewart was not expecting happened. Kurt Busch, Ryan Newman’s teammate, gave Newman a huge push. Newman shot up beside Stewart and kept going. This happened on the last half of the last lap.

Newman took the checkered flag with teammate Kurt Busch right behind him. Kurt Busch was instrumental to Newman’s win.

This was Ryan Newman’s first Sprint Cup points race with new Crew Chief Roy McCauley.

Of the top 10, 6 of the cars were Dodges, 2 were Toyotas, 1 Chevrolet and 1 Ford.

Newman’s previous best finish at Daytona was 3rd.

Here are the un official Daytona 500 Results - top 10.

Finished / Started / Car #
1. / 7 / 12 Ryan Newman Dodge ALLTEL 190/5 200 Running
2. / 43 / 2 Kurt Busch Dodge Miller Lite 175/5 200 Running
3. / 6 / 20 Tony Stewart Toyota The Home Depot 170/5 200 Running
4. / 4 / 18 Kyle Busch Toyota M&M’s 170/10 200 Running
5. / 5 / 41 Reed Sorenson Dodge Target 160/5 200 Running
6. / 35 / 19 Elliott Sadler Dodge Best Buy 150/0 200 Running
7. / 10 / 9 Kasey Kahne Dodge Budweiser 151/5 200 Running
8. / 26 / 7 Robby Gordon Dodge Jim Beam 142/0 200 Running
9. / 3 / 88 Dale Earnhardt Jr. Chevrolet AMP Energy / National Guard 143/5 200 Running
10. / 18 / 16 Greg Biffle Ford 3M 139/5 200 Running

I WILL BE ADDING TO THIS POST LATER THIS EVENING…..PLEASE CHECK BACK.

Update - 22:00 FEB 17th.

Now that the Daytona 500 Party is over, I thought I would write a little more about how Newman did.

For starters I also subscribed to NASCAR RACEVIEW. I got to say that is pretty impressive. I listened to Newman for a lot of the race. I watched Newman on Raceview for the whole race. I watched TV the whole race, but Raceview was on the laptop and I was constantly checking on Newman.

Here are some of the 50th Daytona 500 Race stats.
–Cautions: 7 yellow flags for 23 laps
–Leaders: 42 lead changes among 16 different leaders

Newman started the Daytona 500 in 7th. That is his best start at Daytona.

After the start of the race he started falling back some. I think he went as low 23 in positions. But that was early in the race.

By the time the pit stops at the half way marker were being completed, Newman was running back up front. During that pit stop Roy McCauley had put 0.4 lbs pressure into the right rear and front left. Newman did not like it. He reported that it was not right. He said on the radio that when he was running up front, the car was perfect, well balanced.

But that when someone got about a car length behind him, he was really loose. In fact he kept telling he spotter (Newman’s spotter is his Dad, Greg Newman) that he needed to know sooner when a car was approaching him from the back.

He also reported that when he was in dirty air, it tightened him up. He said that this was actually good, but that the car felt like it was going to break loose at anytime.

McCauley told him that on the next pit stop they would take the air back out of the tires that they had put in.

Tires seemed to pay off for Newman. I think due to the fact that they needed to take air back out of the left front and right rear, Newman had a pit stop where most people took 2 tires and he took 4. This of course affected his restart position, but he had no problem getting back up to the top 10 or top 5.

Generally speaking Newman ran a clean and consistent race all day.

This was Ryan Newman’s first Sprint Cup win since New Hampshire in 2005.

Ryan Newman Quote From Daytona 500
Q. Ryan, can you walk us through the last lap? What were you thinking was going to happen? How did it go?
RYAN NEWMAN: You honestly don’t know. I mean, I would say for sure the leader was a sitting duck on every restart. I didn’t think the 31 had the greatest car all day. We were fortunate that when they split apart that I got the chance to push Tony. That made a difference ’cause that lane moved, it gave Kurt the opportunity to run the high line, which he wanted to.
Kind of the moons just aligned. When I pushed Tony through one and two, part of one and two, I was hoping he was going to hang on to it because I was pushing as hard as I could. We broke free. Kurt came up behind me off of two and just gave me the push from heaven.
It was awesome. Listening to my dad on the radio spotting for me, all the other things, all the other emotions, all the hard work, people that gave me a shot racing quarter midgets, midgets, Sprint cars, Silver Crown cars, I have to thank everybody, including the fans.