2025 Summer Daytona Race Report

The summer 2025 Daytona race report includes one of the best superspeedway races I’ve seen in a long while with really close racing, lots of lead changes and a winner coming from mid pack in just two laps.

I’m usually not a big fan of superspeedway racing. There are generally too many multi-car accidents for me, that often take out cars that could have been contenders. This race was different. There was no crashing across the line, yet the top-four finishers were within 0.4 seconds of each other.

It’s relatively rare for the polesitter to win superspeedway races, but Ryan Blaney did just that. There is an asterisk, however, because qualifying was not held due to lightening.

The 2025 Summer Daytona Caution-/Lead-O-Gram

The lead-o-gram for superspeedway races is usually a mismosh. Sorry about Bell and Logano’s colors being so close. Bell led twice for four laps: laps 100-101 and laps 103-104. The rest is Logano. As usual, the driver colors with lines in them show that the lead was inherited when the leading car did something (pit, crash, etc.)

Cautions

The caution report, below, shows eight cautions: two planned for stage ends and the rest unplanned.

The race included nearly 100 miles of caution, for a 24.4% caution rate. Only 6.25% of the cautions were for stage ends. They averaged five laps apiece.

I did re-classify a couple of cautions here. NASCAR doesn’t break out tire issues, but I do. Two tire issues caused cautions; however, there were two more tire issues that affected Denny Hamlin and Casey Mears. The drivers were able to make it back to pit road without needing a caution thrown.

Also, only one engine failure caused a caution, but there were two engine failures total. Carson Hocevar’s car brought out the caution while A.J. Allmendinger was able to make it to pit road without needing the yellow flag.

The 2025 summer Daytona race had the same number of cautions as this year’s Daytona 500. Given the different race mileages, there were actually more cautions per mile here than in February. You have to go all the way back to the 2019 Daytona 500 to find a race with more than 10 caution-causing incidents.

Lead Changes

There were 44 lead changes in this race. I broke them down into types in the table below.

There were 30 green-flag passes for the lead as measured at the start-finish line. This isn’t a very robust number because the lead changes constantly in superspeedway races and it’s possible for drivers to go from leading to back-of-the-pack in a way that doesn’t happen at other types of tracks. That’s approximately one green-flag pass for the lead every 12 laps of green-flag racing.

This year’s Daytona 500 had 41 green-flag passes, but remember that race is 100 miles longer. So per mile, roughly comparable.

Drivers and Leads

Only three drivers led more than 10% of the laps:

• Ryan Blaney led 27 laps for 16.88% of all laps led
• Joey Logano led 27 laps also
• Cody Ware led 23 laps for 14.37% of the laps led.

Of course, leading laps has little to do with winning at these types of races. Blaney did win the race; however, Logano spun while leading and finished 27th, while Ware finished 20th.

And yes, Shane van Gisbergen led six laps. That doesn’t change my pessimism about his being a meaningful competitor in the playoffs. He finished 16th at Daytona and tied his best oval finish with a P14 last week at Richmond. I would really like him to make it out of the first round, but I’m just not feeling optimistic about it.

Let’s see how I feel next week after Darlington, which SvG says is his favorite oval.

And that’s your 2025 summer Daytona race report!