In the fall of 2023, Ryan Preece met with the media at Darlington Raceway.
He had removed his sunglasses, revealing eyes that looked like something from a horror movie.
The appearance came less than a week after Preece had endured one of the most frightening crashes NASCAR had seen in years at Daytona International Speedway. His car was launched into a violent barrel roll down the backstretch, tumbling through the air in a crash that seemed to last approximately three business days.
Preece walked away.
Amazingly, he would get another chance to test his relationship with Daytona.
Two years later, the speedway once again put Preece through the wringer, another frighting roll over crash.
Now we come to 2026 and remarkably, it gave something back.
Saturday night, Daytona didn’t taketh away.
It gave.
Ryan Preece scored his first points-paying NASCAR Cup Series victory and, with it, punched his ticket into NASCAR’s Chase.
For a driver who had spent years fighting for respect, rides, opportunities and occasionally enough money to keep the dream moving forward, it was a rather satisfying change of pace.
Preece entered the night 31 points below the Chase cut line.
There was no complicated mathematical formula to figure out.
He needed to win.
So he did.
Not without a little Daytona nonsense, naturally.
Preece was caught in a crash at the end of the opening stage, fought his way back through the field and then survived a chaotic overtime finish to take the checkered flag.
Afterward, Preece admitted the team had arrived at Daytona with exactly one mindset.
Attack.
His crew chief, Derrick Finley, had apparently told Preece the No. 60 team was now going to win all 10 Chase races.
“That’s the confidence I want to see out of the D-Rock!” Preece said. “We started off consistent. We had a bit of a slump there in May and June and we sort of found our way over the past few weeks, especially last week.
“We were a contender at Loudon. We were a contender tonight. Denny and those guys have been really fast, but it would be great to go on one hell of a run.”
Preece was locked in before the green flag ever waved.
He was the first driver to arrive at the driver’s meeting, which probably isn’t something normally included in a scouting report on a superspeedway racer, but desperate times tend to produce unusual levels of punctuality.
And when the race reached its final laps, Preece wasn’t interested in simply hanging around and hoping someone else’s mistake would hand him a Chase berth.
He wanted the ball.
Literally.
“I watched the movie The Replacements and I forgot what his first name was, but Falco and at the end he said, ‘Winners want the ball,’” Preece said. “So give me the ball. Derrick gave me the ball tonight and I gave the ball to him, so, for me, yeah, we were locked in.
“There’s just no ifs ands or buts. It was 100 percent about doing nothing other than putting ourselves in position and if we wrecked for the lead, we wrecked for the lead. If I rode around in 30th and didn’t have a chance to win, I’d be mad at myself right now.”
When the caution came out late and sent the race into overtime, Preece actually welcomed the opportunity.
Mostly.
“I actually liked it,” he said. “Part of me liked it because sometimes there are only so many moves you can make. I didn’t like it because the Fords were obviously gonna be taking allegiance to the bottom and I was gonna be the odd man out, but sometimes being the odd man out isn’t a bad thing and you just have to be a racer and you’ve got to use your instincts and do the things that are right.”
That instinct served him well.
The overtime chaos unfolded.
Cars crashed.
The caution flew.
And Ryan Preece had won.
The driver who entered the race knowing victory was his only path into the Chase suddenly found himself standing in Victory Lane.
“I’m not gonna have a voice tomorrow,” Preece said.
Then came the part that explained why this one mattered.
“Before the race, part of me – even last week – I thought we had a contending car that was capable of winning,” he said. “I even kind of got choked up last week, and I’m not an emotional person. I am but I’m not. I don’t cry.”
But Daytona had a way of making emotions unavoidable.
“I’m really shocked right now that I can even speak because there’s really no words to truly tell people how difficult this road has been,” Preece said. “How many times people doubt you, but then I have a group of supporters, people that are from the northeast that have 100 percent been behind me all the way.
“So to stand here in Victory Lane and be able to share this moment with them even though they’re not here is amazing. This is a big win for the northeast. This is a big win for Connecticut. I’m a diehard New Englander, so it’s a big deal.”
There was also the matter of revenge.
Daytona had nearly become synonymous with some of the worst moments of Preece’s racing career.
Saturday night, it finally became one of the best.
“I’m just glad that Daytona decided to love me the way I loved it,” Preece said. “A big day for us at RFK. A big day for me. A big day for my family.”
And that family was waiting for him in Victory Lane.
Preece celebrated with his wife Heather, their children and the family dog.
For Heather, the journey to that photograph had begun long before Cup racing, Chase races and multimillion-dollar racing organizations.
She had been there when Preece was racing at Stafford Speedway on Friday nights, trying to win enough money to keep the dream alive.
“To be able to bring my kids to Victory Lane and my wife to Victory Lane – Heather has been there from when I was broke and trying to win a Stafford race on a Friday night so I can get my 25 percent and make $400, to her not knowing that I borrowed money and I had to pay it back somehow,” Preece said.
The journey included forgotten and worn-out racing shoes, Heather’s credit card being pressed into emergency service at Iowa and eventually moving away from family and friends so Preece could chase his dream in North Carolina.
“To moving down to North Carolina away from her friends and away from her family to chase a dream with me,” Preece said. “Man, this is what racers dream of. It wasn’t given. It was earned.”
That, more than anything, might explain why this victory mattered so much.
Ryan Preece didn’t simply show up in NASCAR and find himself in Victory Lane.
There were borrowed dollars.
There were Friday nights at Stafford.
There were doubts.
There were people who said he wasn’t good enough.
And there were two spectacular Daytona crashes that would have made a lesser person seriously consider taking up golf.
Instead, Preece kept coming back.
On Saturday night, he finally beat Daytona.
“I’m damn proud to be doing it with Mr. Jack Roush, Brad Keselowski and the Fenway Group at RFK, and with Ford,” Preece said.
Now, according to Derrick Finley, the plan is apparently to win all 10 Chase races.
Which is either the sort of confidence every championship contender needs or evidence that the celebrations in Victory Lane may already have begun.
Either way, after what Ryan Preece has survived at Daytona, betting against him suddenly seems like a rather foolish thing to do.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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