Daytona, 'Dega-winning cars MIA for Cup race

The two fastest restrictor-plate cars from 2017 will not be in the field Saturday night at Daytona International Speedway.

Kurt Busch has no choice. The winner of the Daytona 500 lost his Ford when it was placed in the track museum the next morning, where it will stay until next year's Great American Race. As a result, Busch will have his second-best car as he looks for the season sweep in the Coke Zero 400.

"It's a little disappointing that we don't have our winning car," Busch said Thursday. "On Monday afterwards we were pushing it into the museum [and] that experience of losing a race-winning car is tough to accept.

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"But at the end of the day, [it's] one of the coolest feelings in the world. You know what? We'll go build another one and the car we're using this weekend finished sixth earlier this year at Talladega. We'll be all right."

The other car missing is also another Ford.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. will use his Talladega car – but it's his backup car. And one can't blame Stenhouse considering the circumstances. In May, the Roush Fenway Racing driver not only won the pole at Talladega, but then went out and captured his first career win.

"I think a lot of people asked if we were going to run the same car but I talked Jack [Roush] into giving me that one," Stenhouse said. "We have our backup car from Talladega and worked on it. Jimmy Fennig and the guys at the shop have been working on it making sure it was ready to go. In practice today it felt pretty good."

The good news for both Busch and Stenhouse is the Fords again seem to be strong. During the first practice session, many Ford drivers spent time drafting together.
As for not having his proven plate car, Stenhouse didn't consider it all that odd.

"Back in the day it would be odd," he said. "I feel 15 years ago you would take our Talladega car and fix it and put it back together. These teams, I know the processes that Roush Fenway goes through to build these cars, there's so much data that we have to build our cars exactly the same, so we felt like our backup car was identical and we were able to make some improvements and updates since Talladega.

"We feel good with what we got here. All the teams are really good at building cars identical to what they feel is the best."