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The wildcard nature of sports is part of if not a big reason why we all tune in every week. We love the unpredictability of it and the quickest way to get all sports fans to come together, even when standing on opposing sides, is for an underdog to run away with a big, career-changing victory. Victories of that nature happened a couple of times throughout the 2023 season to varying degrees. We here at the Daily Downforce are thrilled to present you this list of 5 of the most unexpected winners to come out of NASCAR’s 75th season. Let’s roll!
I list A. J.’s win as #5 here because while it wasn’t exactly unheard of for him to win under circumstances like this, we certainly weren’t looking for it. When Kaulig announced heading into the 2023 season that A. J. Allmendinger would be going full-time, driving the team’s flagship No. 16, many fans, considering the abundance of road courses on the NASCAR schedule nowadays, for the veteran to nab a win or two here and there. But it almost took an entire season for that to happen.
With many mid-to-lower-in-the-pack runs throughout the season, many of them on Allmendinger’s bread-and-butter tracks, road courses, it had many in the media and in the stands questioning whether or not the then-2-time Cup winner would even be back in Cup next year. Currently, we still don’t know if Allmendinger will return to the No. 16 Chevy. What we do know is that in October of 2023, Allmendinger showed the world what a wheelman he is, capturing the 3rd checkered flag of his career at the Charlotte Roval
You can relieve the final laps of this monumental victory here:
In his post-race interview, you can hear the emotion in his voice. Check it out below.
This might come as a shock to many of the KFB loyalists out there but give me a moment to explain. When Kyle Busch first announced at the end of the 2022 season that he was leaving JGR for the historically struggling though, now, somewhat revitalized Richard Childress Racing, none of us really knew what to expect. I, personally, hoped he would do well, and considering what Tyler Reddick had done in the same ride a year earlier, he should have. But we still didn’t know. This was a lot of change for Rowdy in such a short time frame and he had been struggling at JGR the last couple of years.
Though he won 3 races this year, I listed his win at Auto Club as the biggest shock because it was. While I did expect him to win this year, I didn’t expect it to come like this. This was a statement victory of Busch and his RCR No. 8 crew, no doubt about it. He was in contention to win his first Daytona 500 the week before and followed it up with one of the best wins of his career in the last race at Auto Club Speedway. You can’t write the story better than that!
You can watch his post-race comments here:
That Ross Chastain had a multi-win season, I don’t think anyone can be too surprised. I mean, he won twice last year as well in a break-out year. But 2023 was different. Trackhouse was different. They didn’t show the same speed as Hendrick and, at times, RCR this year as they did last year and I think that made a lot of fans forget about Chastain’s abilities through the Playoffs. An early exit certainly didn’t help much.
We all knew that Chastain was a talented racer and that Trackhouse was a good team. But the reason I list this win, specifically at Phoenix, here on this list is because of where it was at and how it was done. Ross Chastain didn’t win at the spring Phoenix race, no, he won during the season finale. And he raced Ryan Blaney hard in the closing laps. He raced him so hard that it raised some eyebrows amongst the NASCAR independent media folks. We had never seen a non-championship 4 driver race the title contenders so aggressively with so much more on the line for them than the eventual winner.
But Ross Chastain doesn’t do anything halfway. He wanted the win and he went out and got it, almost making a mess of things before cooler heads prevailed.
In the end, it was Ross Chastain who became the first ever non-championship 4 driver to win the season finale since this format was adopted in 2014, ten years ago. Certainly, like the Hail Melon the year before, that’s one for the history books!
No one in their right mind will deny that Michael McDowell and his Front Row Racing team have made some great strides in the last couple of years. Ever since qualifying for the 2021 Playoffs by winning that year’s Daytona 500, that team has been on an upward trajectory, both of their cars improving mightily. And though Michael McDowell has historically done well on road courses and it was not inconceivable that he could sneak away with a win at one, nobody could have predicted the sheer dominance McDowell and crew showed at 2023’s Indy Road Course race.
Michael McDowell DOMINATED the Indy Road Course to score his second-career NASCAR Cup Series victory. He was just undisputedly the best car that weekend and he went out and took what he felt was rightfully his. You can relive this monumental moment in McDowell’s racing career in the clips below.
And here it is, the biggie! If anyone tries to tell you that they honestly believed that Shane van Gisbergen would win a NASCAR Cup Series race while making his debut, they’re liars! No one could have predicted this because it honestly hasn’t been done before. I mean, yeah, drivers have won in their debuts before but not with these huge differences in discipline. Denny Hamlin even said it himself: sure, while street racing is SVG’s bread-and-butter, when you really start to think about how he was driving on the opposite side of the car than he was used to, using muscles differently than he ever had to before, it’s utterly unthinkable!
SVG’s historic win at the Chicago Street Course has led him indefinitely into our NASCAR world and we’ll be hearing about him, I’m sure, for many years to come. While he may not run full-time in the NASCAR Cup Series in 2024, expect him in a few races, driving that familiar No. 91 for Trackhouse, and expect him in even more races in the Truck and Xfinity Series. He clearly has a bright future here in NASCAR and a loyal fanbase to boot.
You can relive this historic victory in the video clips below:
What 2023 win did you find most unexpected NASCAR fans and Daily Downforce readers? Let us know!
