Mike Kelley, the crew chief at JTG Daugherty Racing, couldn’t sleep Sunday morning so he got up at 3:30 a.m. and wrote his driver a message.
He taped that message to the post directly above the windshield that his driver, Ricky Stenhouse, could see when he was strapped in the race car before Sunday’s 65th Daytona 500.
It simply said, “We Believe.”
That belief never wavered through the longest Daytona 500 in history, covering 212 laps and 530 miles.
“I think this whole off-season Mike just preached how much we all believed in each other,” Stenhouse said after the biggest racing victory of his career. “They left me a note in the car that said they believe in me and to go get the job done tonight.”
Leaving a note for Stenhouse is something Kelley has done since the two were together in the NASCAR Xfinity Series days.
The green flag for the 65th Daytona 500 was set to start at 2:45 p.m. Eastern Time. Waking up 11 hours before the race even started proves Kelley had a lot on his mind.
So, he put it to use with the note that inspired his driver to victory.
“I’ve been coming here for a long time,” Kelley said. “I think it’s like my 27th year coming here, and I’ve been fortunate to win the 500 one time before.
“But something this morning felt different. It’s kind of how our week started. I kept telling myself, ‘If we just keep working on our car and keep believing in ourselves, maybe something will work out.’
“When I woke up this morning, I just wrote him a note that only he would see, and it was on top of the roll bar in front of him, and it said, ‘We believe.’
“That has been our team’s motto all off-season is we believe.”
JTG Daugherty is a single-car team and one of the smallest teams in the NASCAR Cup Series. Stenhouse’s victory is the first time a single-car team has won the Daytona 500 since Trevor Bayne drove the Wood Brothers Ford to victory in a stunning upset in 2011.
“We’re not a super powerhouse team,” Kelley said. “We’re small. I think there are 40, 45 employees that work in our shop every day. But I have 45 people that believe in what we’re trying to accomplish. We’re trying to get people to believe in Ricky Stenhouse again. We’re trying to get people to believe in myself and the vision that we have.
“That’s all it was, a simple note on a piece of duct tape that I wrote that said, “We believe, and we believe today,” and I stuck it up there above his head.”
Kelley didn’t tell Stenhouse about the note, but the driver saw it as soon as he tightened the belts in his seat to wait for the command to fire up the engines.
Keeping the note a secret was by design.
“I didn’t tell him, and that’s how we’ve done it before,” Kelley said. “I know he probably saw it and he didn’t need to ask me about it. I think he probably saw it. I asked him about it after the race was over, and I said, ‘Did you see it,’ and he told me he did.
“That meant enough to me.”
It was the first victory for JTG Daugherty Racing since A.J. Allmendinger won at Watkins Glen (N.Y.) in 2014. It was just the team’s second Cup victory, and its first Cup Series win in 266 races.
The win also broke a 199-race winless streak for Stenhouse, a dirt track racer from Olive Branch, Mississippi.
But the team still believed they could win the biggest race of the year.
It culminated with a massive crash in turn two after Kyle Larson’s Chevrolet was hit from behind by Travis Pastrana’s Toyota in a mad scramble on the white flag lap of the second overtime. That sent Larson’s car into the wall, triggering mayhem.
With sparks and fire coming from turn two, other drivers involved included Aric Almirola, defending Daytona 500 winner Austin Cindric, Bubba Wallace, Brad Keselowski, Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin, and Allmendinger.
Although Joey Logano’s No. 22 Ford was the first to cross under the yellow and checkered flags at reduced speed, Stenhouse’s Chevrolet was in front at the time of the caution, and he was declared the winner.
“I think last year this team was sitting in the same spot they were tonight,” Kelley recalled. “I think at lap 195 they were leading the race with four or five to go and got dunked and got wrecked.
“That’s just the nature of the beast. I thought that exact same thing would happen tonight. I saw the cameras starting to gather around the pit box when we were in the green-white-checkered and I wouldn’t look at them and I wouldn’t look up, because I know it means so much to every driver out there, not just mine.”
Kelley’s belief in his driver was strong, but he was very nervous at the end because he knows the risk of late-race restarts at superspeedway tracks at Daytona and Talladega.
“I was worried when we took that last restart, but I believed in Ricky’s abilities and that he would put himself in the best position he could,” Kelley said. “To come around and hear that we actually — at first, I wasn’t positive that we had won, and I wasn’t going to celebrate until I heard it in my ear. And then you just don’t believe it, right?
“You’re like, man, this is killing me. This is a dream come true.
“I joke with my PR girl, Jen, NASCAR sends out a lot of emails about what the post-race celebration process is and where you guys are going, and I think there was another revision this morning about going to Chicago. I joked with her, and I said, look, ‘I’m going to be so drunk you’re going to have to just tell me again.
“’So, it’s OK if you wait and send me another email about it.”
Country Music star Tim McGraw’s father pitched for the New York Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies for 19 years beginning in 1965. In 1973 when he was with the Mets, McGraw coined the phrase, “Ya’ Gotta Believe.”
The mediocre Mets were able to believe in themselves and win the team’s second National League pennant that season before losing to the powerhouse Oakland Athletics in the 1973 season.
To a degree, the same can be said for Kelley, Stenhouse and JTG Daugherty.
They continued to believe in themselves, and they will forever be known as Daytona 500 champions.
“To me it was just getting Ricky to believe in himself again and getting the people around us to believe in the situation we’re in,” Kelley said. “There will be champions that will quit their career and never win the 500, and there will be guys who have missed so many opportunities so close.
“I know what it means to them guys, and it means — to every one of us that work on these things all winter long, that provide ownership and sponsorship, and it’s everyone, the people that buy our hotel rooms.
“The Daytona 500 is what we race for, and from a kid who grew up in Florida, it has extra special meaning.”