This year's Daytona 500 was blanketed with emotion on the 10-year anniversary of the crash here that killed Dale Earnhardt, the iconic Nascar champion known even to casual fans of stock car racing.
But Trevor Bayne, a Knoxville, Tenn., native who was about to turn 10 years old when Earnhardt died on the last lap of NASCAR's crown-jewel race, marked a different 10-year milepost at Daytona with a shocking upset Sunday.
After surviving a spree of crashes that collected many of NASCAR's top drivers, Bayne held off a charging Carl Edwards and David Gilliland to win a wild Daytona 500 for the Wood Brothers a once-famous team that fell on hard times and hadn't won a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race since the year Earnhardt died.
Bayne did so one day after turning 20, becoming the youngest winner in the 53-year history of the Daytona 500 by a wide margin. Jeff Gordon previously held the record, winning the 1997 race at 25.
The win also came in only Bayne's second race in NASCAR's premier series; he mainly competes in its second-tier Nationwide Series.
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