After numerous frustrating finishes, Tony Stewart finally won at NASCAR’s most famous track. Stewart dominated the rain-delayed Pepsi 400 last year, but still needed a dramatic four-wide pass to move to the front, then pulled away on a restart with nine laps left to seal his first Nextel Cup victory in 14 starts at Daytona International Speedway. Winning this race at the Daytona 500 or at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the best win a driver could ever have Stewart said. But Stewart will settle for this for now, he celebrated by climbing the fence into the flag stand to claim the checkered flag. It was his second consecutive victory and showed that the 2002 series champion can still be a contender. He started from the pole, led a race-record 151 of 160 laps, and moved to third in the standings Daytona International Speedway opened in 1959, but the history of auto racing at Daytona goes back much farther than that. In 1936, the precursor to today’s Daytona 500 was born on a course that went down 1.5 miles of highway.
William H.G. France, a mechanic and racer who’d moved south from Washington, D.C., eventually took over the job of running the beach...