It wasn't pretty, but the first race of the 2012 NASCAR season is in the books as Matt Kenseth won 'The Great American Race'. The 54th running of the Daytona 500 had several obstacles to overcome.  For the first time in the history of the Daytona 500, it was postponed due to rain so the race was ran on Monday.  Where the element of rain postponed the race, it was the element of fire that red flagged the race with 40 laps to go taking the race well into the night.

After being rained out a day earlier, the race was finally run under the lights and it didn't take long for everything to start going nuts.  On lap 2, Elliott Sadler ran into the back of Jimmy Johnson which took the 5 time Sprint Cup Champion out of the race completely.  The wreck also took out Danica Patrick, who was in her very first Daytona 500.

The race pretty much settled down after that, but it on lap 160, one of the weirdest things to happen on a track took place.

After a caution came out, Juan Pablo Montoya was trying to catch back up to the rest of the pack and get ready to go green, when all of a sudden, something broke on his car and it sent him crashing into one of the massive jet dryers that was cleaning up the track.  This caused a huge explosion and 200 gallons of jet fuel began to pour out onto the track. Both Montoya and the driver of the jet truck were OK, but it took a long time to clean up the mess.

Jet Truck Fire
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After about 10 minutes of being under the red flag, the drivers were allowed to get out and Brad Keselowski started tweeting about the race, tripling his Twitter followers.

After the long wait, the race was finally back on and each lap intensified with Roush teammates, Greg Biffle and Matt Kenseth working together to hold off the third place car of Dale Earnahardt Jr. In the end, it was Kenseth beating Earnhardt to get the checkered flag.

This was one of the weirdest races I have seen but it was a heck of a way to start out the 2012 NASCAR season.

 

Check out pictures of the race now

Did you watch the race? What did you think of it and how did you're driver do?

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