How NASCAR's blue-collar man, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., finally won the Daytona 500

Stenhouse fulfills the faith Tad and Jody Geschickter and Brad Daugherty always had in him

Ricky Stenhouse has had a history of misfortune during his NASCAR career, including losing his ride with the then-Roush-Fenway Racing, qualifying for the NASCAR Cup playoffs just once, earning just two wins and falling short with five other runner-ups, and then there was the celebrated romance which eventually ended with Danica Patrick.

But Sunday, good fortune – no, make that great fortune – fell upon the Olive Branch, Mississippi native as he won the 65th Daytona 500, increasing his overall wins mark in Cup racing to three.

By going to victory lane, Stenhouse did something that some of NASCAR’s greatest drivers – including several Hall of Famers – never achieved in their own racing careers, namely, winning the Great American Race.

Eat your hearts out, Tony Stewart (17 winless starts in the sport’s version of the Super Bowl), Rusty Wallace (23 starts), Terry Labonte (leads everybody with 32 starts and zero wins in the 500), Ricky Rudd (29), Mark Martin (also 29), Martin Truex Jr. (19) and Kyle Busch (18) – among others.

You can now remove Stenhouse’s name – his previous best finish in the 500 was seventh in 2014 – from that list and the 11 previous attempts he made at winning NASCAR’s biggest race and unceremoniously fell short.

Stenhouse put his name on the Harley J. Earl Trophy in one of the hardest ways possible: driving for a single-car team that, at its best, was only a mid-pack team.

He also now holds the honor of winning NASCAR’s longest-ever episode of the Daytona 500, needing double overtime to cross the finish line on fumes (his car ran out of gas on the victory lap and had to be pushed to victory lane).

And perhaps most importantly, Stenhouse gave Jodi and Tad Geschickter and co-owner Brad Daugherty their biggest race win ever.

And probably made Jack Roush a bit disconsolate on Sunday that he let Stenhouse go after the 2019 season (Roush’s organization has won just one race since Stenhouse’s tenure, a 2022 triumph by Chris Buescher at Bristol).

When Stenhouse won back-to-back Xfinity Series championships in 2011 and 2012, he was considered by many as NASCAR’s next great big thing, the Cup Series’ next great, big champion to be.

Unfortunately, expectations for Stenhouse in Cup never really materialized, as he won just two races during his seven-year tenure as a full-time Cup driver for the Roush camp.

But RFR’s – make that now RFK Racing (Roush-Fenway-Keselowski Racing) – loss has definitely been JTG-Daugherty Racing’s gain. And it paid off in the biggest fashion, with a million-dollar-plus winner’s check and notoriety that hey, maybe the little engine that could, actually did so.

Since joining JTG-Daugherty in 2020, Stenhouse fought hard and battled as much as any other driver out there, but admittedly had mediocre finishes in the overall season standings, finishing 24th in 2020, 22nd in 2021 and 26th in 2022 (the second-lowest finish of his Cup career, bested only by finishing 27th in 2014).

But now, Stenhouse is in a very happy yet also a very unfamiliar place. Not only has he earned an automatic berth in the 2023 NASCAR Cup playoffs, he also leaves Daytona International Speedway is just four points from the top of the Cup standings.

The 35-year-old Stenhouse has very much been the worker-bee of the Cup class, a blue-collar kind of guy who rarely did anything that warranted him being penalized by NASCAR or being called out by social media trolls.

No, Stenhouse went out and did his job every race. He may not have always had the best equipment or the most talented team around him, and he hadn’t won a Cup race since 2017 (the same season he won both of his two prior Cup career races), but he never, ever gave up on his blue-collar roots and motivation.

When I saw Stenhouse beat Joey Logano to the finish line Sunday, a song came into my head: Blue Collar Man by Styx. That song, written by lead guitarist Tommy Shaw (copyright Almo Music Corp. and Stygian Songs), has a lot of meaning to me as Styx is from the same neighborhood I grew up in on the south side of Chicago.

As Stenhouse celebrated on the front stretch, being interviewed by Fox Sports, I thought about how some of the lyrics were so spot-on in describing him and his workman-like demeanor.

If you’ll indulge me, here are some of those lyrics that could be the best words ever to describe Stenhouse and his life and racing career:

When he was cut from Roush Fenway Racing after the 2019 season and before he was picked up by JTG-Daugherty: “Give me a job, give me security, give me a chance to survive. I’m just a poor soul in the unemployment line, My God, I’m hardly alive. ... I’ve got the power and I’ve got the will, I’m not a charity case.”

And then there's how one of the longest of long shots to win not only Sunday’s Daytona 500, but ANY Daytona 500 and how he ultimately repaid JTG-Daugherty’s faith and belief in him when they offered him a job in 2020: “Make me an offer that I can’t refuse, make me respectable man, this is my last time in the unemployment line. So like it or not, I’ll take the long nights, impossible odds, keepin’ my eye to the keyhole. If it takes all night to be just what I am, well I’m gonna be blue collar man.”

To put an exclamation mark not just on that song, but the biggest win of Stenhouse’s career, as he said to Jaime Little, “I hope y’all had fun. That was a heck of a race.”

Indeed it was a heck of a race, a heck of a finish and a heck of an accomplishment by a non-pretentious, workman-like kind of guy. In any other job, Stenhouse would likely be a guy who wore a blue-collar shirt and blue jeans, a guy who goes out and does his job every day, doesn’t complain and gives his best effort every day.

That’s the mark of a true blue-collar man, and that’s truly Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Daytona 500 champion.

Follow Jerry Bonkowski on Twitter @JerryBonkowski

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