DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—The pressure of delivering the 100th win for Wood Brothers Racing is over for Harrison Burton.
Through three seasons and 97 races behind the wheel of the venerable No. 21 Ford, the challenge to continue an eight-decade legacy of winning and to capture that elusive victory remained unfulfilled.
But on Saturday night at Daytona International Speedway, Burton finally pieced together a near-perfect race. He survived two wrecks that wiped out 15 of his competitors, then outran two-time NASCAR Cup champion Kyle Busch over a five-mile shootout in overtime to win the Coke Zero 400.
“I am just so happy right now,” Burton said in Victory Lane. “I was so scared to leave this opportunity. Obviously, losing this job and not going the way it should have gone—or the way I think it could have gone—I was so scared to lose this opportunity without giving the Wood Brothers their 100th win.
“How often do you get that opportunity to get that 100th win for the Wood Brothers? They have been teetering on 99 for so long.”
Seven years and 262 races to be exact. Ryan Blaney, the current NASCAR Cup champion, scored his first win in his second full season with the Wood Brothers at the 2017 Pocono 400. Blaney, who was also 23 at the time, was fast-tracked to Team Penske the following season.
Unfortunately for Burton, the victory came a little too late to salvage his job. The second-generation racer did not crack the top 25 in points in his previous two seasons. Before Saturday’s win, his only top five in 97 Cup starts came at the 2022 Indianapolis Grand Prix.
“When I first got hired, that’s what they told me they wanted me to do,” Burton said of the win. “To make that come true is just so cool. I can finally have some closure in that way.”
When he didn’t win in his final Xfinity Series season with Joe Gibbs Racing, NASCAR’s premiere stable on that tour, pundits questioned whether Burton’s graduation to Cup was premature. His struggles on stock car’s top tour were stark.
Despite recruiting crew chief Jeremy Bullins to right the ship one year ago before the Playoffs, Burton crashed at Darlington Raceway and the following weekend at Kansas Speedway. The car experienced mechanical failures at Talladega Superspeedway and Homestead-Miami Speedway. Burton’s best result was 15th at Martinsville Speedway—the Wood Brothers’ and Burton’s parents’ home track.
Although Burton’s contract was renewed for this season, prior to his win at Daytona, his only top-10 finish came at another superspeedway—Talladega. In July, the Wood Brothers announced Josh Berry would drive the No. 21 Ford in 2025.
Jeff Burton, a former driver and current NBC analyst, has endured the highs and lows of his son’s progression in the sport.
“You’re swimming with the sharks when you’re in this series,” Burton said. “People don’t know how hard it is. It’s like watching an NFL game. Everyone is running faster but they’re all running together, so you can’t show ‘em up. It’s chaos. It’s next level.
“I think it knocked Harrison on his heels a little bit understanding how hard it was—how hard it is. You’d see it in his confidence. You would see it at Darlington, where he always hauled ass, places he ran well like last week at Michigan. And you could see it happening but he just couldn’t close the deal. Last year, it kept feeling like, ‘OK, they’re going to run 12th,’ and something would happen. ‘They’re going to run 15th,’ and something would happen. They just couldn’t get finishes. Then that continued into this year. They just ran out of time.
“That happens. It’s sports. But to get it done, in the Wood Brothers’ 100th damn win, good Lord, that is big stuff.”
In the hours leading up to Saturday’s contest, Burton studied previous finishes at Daytona. In five starts, his best result was 19th, and he was parked under the damaged vehicle policy in that race.
“There were a lot of wrecks I thought I was going to be in (on Saturday), to be honest,” Burton said. “I flat-spotted a tire in the second-to-the-last wreck there. The last wreck, the hole closed behind me and Todd Gilliland got caught up. It was just fortunate that we got through there.
“I’ve been caught up in so many wrecks at these places. I try so hard to look ahead—and look five, six rows ahead if I can. It takes some bandwidth away from making moves that you need to. It takes some bandwidth away from pushing the you need to but it paid off tonight because I was able to miss those wrecks.
“Then to go toe-to-toe with Kyle Busch at the end and to come out on top means a lot to me, for sure.”
Burton credited rookie Parker Retzlaff, who in just his second Cup start was savvy enough to push him at the appropriate time and back off when the No. 21 Ford was unstable. Overly aggressive moves triggered most of the wrecks on Saturday.
Luck was also on Burton’s side. He wrecked in the season-opening Daytona 500 as well as three of the last six Cup races.
“We knew the speedway races were our opportunity to get a win,” said Bullins, who also led Blaney to the Wood Brothers’ 99th win. “There is a luck factor. You have to miss everything. And this is one of the first times that we’ve missed everything. I knew when we lined up on the front row, we had a chance, and it all worked out.”
Blaney was one of the first drivers to congratulate Bullins, Burton and the Wood Brothers in Victory Lane—and the processional continued with a parade of team principals and drivers, including three whom the winning driver had dinner with during the rain delay one week earlier at Michigan. As Burton sat at a table with his friends Austin Cindric and Gilliland, the 20-somethings agreed that one of the drivers would win Daytona.
For once, Burton pulled the long straw.
“Now we’re in the Playoffs, right?” Burton said with a smile. “We’ve been given this amazing opportunity to jump where we were in points to go up and now our bad year—other than being down in Playoff points—doesn’t matter anymore. We’re in the top 16 now. We have to go and act like we belong.
“I’m going to one of my better tracks—Darlington—next weekend to build momentum. Hopefully, we can get some points and that will help us. Then we go to Atlanta in the first round, and obviously, we’re a good team on the plate tracks. I’ve run well at Atlanta. All you have to do is survive and advance.
“It’s just such an opportunity for us. And I’m going to work my ass off to make the most of it and try to advance as far as I can.”
Follow Lee Spencer on Twitter @CandiceSpencer or email her at: [email protected].
