Last lap is quite a show-stopper Sunday

Clint Bowyer's car skids across the finish line and ends up on fire as 7 drivers wreck at the end.

Alan Schmadtke | Sentinel Staff Writer

February 19, 2007

DAYTONA BEACH - As he sat on the backstretch in his No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet pondering the coming green-white-checkered finish to Sunday's Daytona 500, Jeff Gordon wiped oil from his windshield.

Didn't matter. He still couldn't see. Later, he didn't mind at all.

"I don't know that I wanted to see what was in front of me on that last lap," Gordon said after his 10th-place finish, a position that was lowered by the fact he got caught up in a tri-oval frenzy highlighted by Clint Bowyer's No. 07 Jack Daniels car on fire and scraping across the start/finish line on its roof.

Kyle Busch's wiggle out of Turn 4 turned into a seven-car fireworks show that preceded the real ones marking Kevin Harvick's victory.

Gordon, Bowyer, polesitter David Gilliland, David Stremme, Casey Mears, Sterling Marlin and Matt Kenseth were among the unfortunate drivers caught up in a post-sundown finish that needed lights to be believed.

Gilliland finished eighth, Stremme 11th, Bowyer 18th, Busch 24th and Kenseth 27th.

"I saw Clint on his roof and it was just nuts," said an aggravated Stremme, who came into Sunday with one of the field's fastest cars.

"At the end, all of a sudden people were coming from everywhere, going places they shouldn't be going and driving like they shouldn't be driving. It was crazy, but it didn't surprise me a lot."

The incident was triggered by a combination of hard tires and impatience.

As a line of anxious drivers floored their cars into a chain pushing on Busch's bumper, his tires wouldn't allow him to stay straight.

Bowyer would have settled for staying on his tires.

"I thought I was out of the deal," Bowyer said.

"Got out of it unscathed [but] someone clipped us in the rear and away she went. . . . I really thought we ended up a little better than that.

"If we were going to end up on our lid, we better end up better than that."

Alan Schmadtke can be reached at aschmadtke@orlandosentinel.com.