Ryan Sieg waited 424 starts to win a NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race.
And then, because motorsports has a peculiar sense of humor and apparently enjoys making people suffer before handing them anything nice, he had to go to overtime at Daytona International Speedway and beat Austin Hill to finally do it.
Thirteen years. Five runner-up finishes. Hundreds of races. And countless moments when it probably seemed like victory lane was some mythical place RSS Racing drivers could visit only after buying a ticket.
Friday night, Sieg finally kicked the door in.
In his 424th career O’Reilly Auto Parts Series start, Sieg drove the family-owned No. 38 RSS Racing Chevrolet to his first victory in NASCAR’s second-highest level, holding off Daytona ace Austin Hill by 0.149 seconds in an overtime dash that turned the regular-season finale into the sort of madness Daytona has been producing since somebody decided racing 40 cars inches apart at nearly 200 mph was a sensible hobby.
Sieg took the lead on the overtime restart and somehow managed to keep both Carson Kvapil and Hill behind him as the field thundered toward the checkered flag.
Hill finished second, Kvapil was third, Anthony Alfredo fourth and Brandon Jones completed the top five.
Justin Allgaier finished sixth, followed by Brennan Poole, Harrison Burton, Jeb Burton and Sheldon Creed.
But Friday night belonged to Sieg.
“This is incredible,” Sieg said after climbing from the car. “Especially doing it here at Daytona. I’ve been coming here since I was a baby. To do it right now and the way we did it, that’s amazing… This has been a long way coming. Last week we got the pole, and we came back to Daytona where I really wanted to win and we fricking did it.”
Yes, they did.
After 424 attempts, Sieg was finally standing in victory lane.
Asked what was going through his mind coming off the final corner, Sieg’s strategy was refreshingly uncomplicated.
“Just don’t mess up and get too far out, and just watching both lanes.”
Frankly, after waiting 13 years, that was probably the correct approach.
The victory made Sieg the fifth first-time winner in the O’Reilly Series this season and delivered one of those moments NASCAR occasionally produces that cannot be manufactured with fireworks, celebrity appearances or a marketing department.
Sometimes the guy who’s been grinding away for more than a decade simply wins.
The race itself, meanwhile, behaved exactly as a Daytona race involving desperate Chase bubble drivers should behave.
Which is to say, it was an absolute mess.
Several drivers fighting for the final Chase positions suffered damage in early crashes, beginning on Lap 27 when Patrick Staropoli triggered a Turn 3 incident that collected Sam Mayer and Brent Crews.
Crews’ No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota was sent to the garage, which was not the sort of evening he needed with the Chase field still very much unsettled.
Eighteen laps later, things got worse.
Corey Day and Alfredo made contact down the frontstretch, sending Day spinning across the track and into Sammy Smith and William Sawalich. Sawalich suffered heavy damage after being caught in the middle of somebody else’s problem, which is roughly the Daytona equivalent of getting hit by a piano while walking to the mailbox.
Those crashes dramatically altered the Chase picture.
Sawalich and Crews entered Friday’s regular-season finale just one point above the cutline and ahead of fellow Joe Gibbs Racing driver Taylor Gray.
By the end of the night, neither Sawalich nor Crews had advanced.
Gray finished 26th, which was enough to secure the final Chase position.
Mayer, despite the early damage, also survived the madness.
Joining Gray and Mayer in the final four Chase positions were Parker Retzlaff and Rajah Caruth.
Caruth’s route to the postseason was particularly dramatic.
Running second with three laps remaining, Caruth was spun down the backstretch after a push from JR Motorsports teammate Allgaier, bringing out the caution that eventually sent the race into overtime.
Caruth finished 32nd.
But thanks to 18 stage points, he had already done enough.
Sometimes making the Chase means surviving the race.
Sometimes it means scoring enough points before somebody turns your car around at 190 mph.
Caruth experienced both.
Hill won Stage 1 under caution, followed by Kvapil, Caruth, Alfredo, Smith, Harrison Burton, Allgaier, Brandon Jones, Sawalich and Taylor Gray.
Stage 2 continued the evening’s theme of drivers discovering that Daytona has absolutely no interest in making anything easy.
Day came down in front of Alfredo midway through the stage, contact was made and the resulting chaos sent Smith hard into the outside wall. Sawalich then found himself with nowhere useful to go and suffered heavy damage.
Caruth eventually won Stage 2 under caution, followed by Alfredo, Kvapil, Allgaier, Jeb Burton, Creed, Mayer, Jesse Love, Ryan Perkins and Nick Sanchez.
Hill also provided one of the night’s more remarkable moments when he spun off Alfredo’s nose on the frontstretch, rotating through nearly four complete 360-degree spins while somehow suffering almost no significant damage.
Hill then went on to finish second.
Daytona is a strange place.
You can be leading, crash, spin four times and continue racing.
Or you can be minding your own business and get collected by somebody else’s catastrophe.
By the time overtime arrived, however, Sieg was exactly where he needed to be.
At the front.
He grabbed the lead on the restart and defended it all the way to the checkered flag, holding off Hill and Kvapil to finally erase one of the longest waits for a first victory in recent O’Reilly Series history.
For RSS Racing, the family-owned team Sieg drives for and operates, the win was equally significant.
There was no giant corporate empire behind the celebration.
No massive operation with seemingly unlimited resources.
Just a family team and a driver who kept showing up.
For 424 races.
Until finally, unbelievably, wonderfully, Ryan Sieg won one.
The O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Chase begins Sept. 5 at Darlington Raceway, with coverage scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET on The CW, ESPN Unlimited, MRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
And Ryan Sieg will arrive there with something he waited 13 years to get.
A trophy.
And presumably a very large grin.
RACE RESULTS
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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