Delayed by tornado warnings and rain, the 2014 Daytona 500 was delayed for six hours and 22 minutes before Dale Earnhardt, Jr. finally won the season-opening NASCAR Sprint Cup series race. It was Earnhardt, Jr.’s first NASCAR win since 2012 as he held off the charging Denny Hamlin when a late crash brought out the yellow flag and the race finished anticlimactically under caution.
On a humorous side note, televising network Fox ran a replay of the 2013 race during the rain delay but many people thought the race was from 2014 despite the information on a bottom screen ticker saying otherwise – this included members of Fox’s network reporting on the 2013 race as if it was the 2014 race.