This changes everything.
It’s an oft-used idiom but it could not be any more appropriate than on Saturday night after Harrison Burton won the Coke Zero Sugar 400 on Daytona International Speedway.
The victory literally changed everything for every principal directly involved.
Burton himself needed this after a Cup Series career that has inexplicably gone so wrong so far. The Wood Brothers family and team, the most tenured in the 75 year history of NASCAR, needed this as winning a regular season Cup race just vastly improved their economic standing.
Who didn’t need this is Ross Chastain and Bubba Wallace, now both well below the playoff cutline with only one race left in the regular season. For a moment, Kyle Busch was leading and suddenly in the playoffs and then suddenly they were not.
This changed things back and forth for all of them.
In five seconds, entire figurative worlds were turned upside down, and the literal landscape shifted.
Burton was practically fired just over a month ago.
Because things just didn’t go right over the past 31 months, the team moved a different direction for the 2025 season but that doesn’t mean Len, Eddie and Jon Wood stopped believing in him. They never did. It just didn’t work out.
Burton continued to put in the work, saying that he treated every week as a new opportunity, and that was never lost on team leadership or crew chief Jeremy Bullins who has worked with him the most over the past 15 months.
“I probably worked with him most than anybody up here the last how many races,” Bullins said. “We’ve not performed like we want to. Neither one of us, right? Our expectations are much higher. It’s not been the year we wanted. But nobody’s quit. Nobody on the team. Certainly not Harrison.
“I will sit here and tell you that I’ve worked with a lot of drivers over the years. Some guys are quicker than others to point fingers when things aren’t going right. Not once, not once, has he ever questioned anything or questioned us or what we were doing. We all just kind of kept pulling the rope the right direction. Good things happened.”
And Jon Wood credited Burton on a human level.
“You can’t help but pull for him,” Wood said. “I think that’s the thing about Harrison. A lot of our fan base, a lot of fan base just doesn’t see.
“When you’re running bad, you don’t get a lot of coverage, you don’t get the chance to have that exposure and opportunity to show people who you are. This is a great time to do that. You see the real Harrison sitting here. We’re so stoked to be with him.
“Again, you just can’t help but want the best for him. He’s not like most of them.”
And despite how things are set to end come November, they meant these words entirely too. Burton gave the team its 100th victory at the highest level and that makes him a Wood Bros. driver for life.
It wasn’t that long ago that Burton was a heralded young prospect, who came off a successful Super Late Model development stint and a K&N Pro Series East championship with four victories in the Xfinity Series in 2020 before moving up to Cup in 2022.
His dad has ridden that rollercoaster with him.
“You’ve seen the Harrison that we’ve seen,” Jeff said to Sportsnaut. “A lot of Cup fans haven’t seen that Harrison. We’ve seen Harrison take the fight to the best short trackers in the country. You’ve seen him do things at 14 and 15 years old that made you say ‘that guy is going to be racing on Sundays’ and you were there for those races.
“He hasn’t shown that here. His first year in Xfinity was spectacular but since then, the results haven’t been there, so Cup fans see him as a guy that hasn’t had success. And that’s fair. That’s fair. He hasn’t. We’ve been there when he was a badass.
“He’s lost his confidence. It happens to every athlete along the way. These are shark infested waters. He’s needed to do a better job. It’s on everyone but Harrison knows not to point the finger and put it on them. He’s not that guy. He needs to do a better job and that’s what my focus has been on. We don’t have conversations about what someone else did. It’s about what he could have done better.”
And maybe, having everything go right for once takes that pressure off, and gives him the chance to build some confidence. In two weeks, Burton is going to rise from outside the top-30 in the standings to 16th.
He will be unburdened by everything that came before and that’s a positive change for him too.
For Jon, his father (Eddie) and uncle (Len), this win also means a change of over two millions dollars this year because they will finish no worse than 16th in the championship this year but also millions when factoring the three-year value of the charter as well, per regulations.
“I’m happy that it happened today rather than two weeks from now because this is a huge boost of money,” Jon told Sportsnaut in Victory Lane. “That part is boring to fans and they probably shouldn’t care about it, but to a single car team, this is a massive deal and to have your next two years’ worth of income changed in five seconds is a really, really big deal to have that happen.”
That is real change for the iconic No. 21 too.
The most immediately impacted by the win was Wallace, who was not only knocked below the cutline, since Burton now moves into the Round of 16 but also 21 points behind Chris Buescher for what is now the final spot in the cutline.
The fact that he is in this position, while teammate Tyler Reddick closes on the regular season champion, left him frustrated exiting Daytona.
“You got one car fighting for a regular-season championship, and another car right on the bubble. Unacceptable,” Wallace said. “I’ll take all that weight on my shoulders. Should have won multiple times this year and I haven’t. We don’t even deserve to be here and we are. Got to go win next week. That’s it.
Surely Chastain feels the same way too, having entered one point above the cutline and now leaves 27 below it because he was caught up in a crash but he didn’t say it.
“I look at it like we have another chance to go win the Southern 500,” Chastain said. “The points, listen, they give them out at the end of the stages and the races and if you run good, they give you lots of them. I’m just excited to have a chance to try to win the Southern 500.”
And really, if it wasn’t going to be Burton, it looked like it was going to be Busch who led from the start of overtime and took the white flag as the leader. A push from Parker Retzlaff in the Beard Motorsports No. 62 sent Burton ahead on the outside.
Busch could have blocked it, risking a huge crash for the off-chance it would have won him the race, but he wasn’t going to do it that way.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way,” Busch said. “I could have certainly made the wrong way work for me but that’s not for me. I could have jumped up in front of the 21 and taken that but I don’t know that he would have kept straight on me and I had more trust in (Christopher Bell) being a better ally and it just didn’t work out.”
And if it did work out, this conversation would be about the two-time champion overcoming his worst career winless season to bump Wallace and Chastain out of the playoffs rather than Burton. He hasn’t missed the playoff since 2021 and hasn’t gone winless in a season in almost 20 years.
So change was going to happen one way or the other.
Ultimately, Burton is not going to be back in the No. 21 next season. He’s had offers to race at all three national touring divisions. It’s not yet known which one of those potential options he will land at.
But right now, in this moment, he changed the entire perception of his career by becoming a NASCAR Cup Series winner in one of the most iconic entries.
“You never know when you have a chance to drive again,” Burton said. “You never know when you have a chance. This could all fall apart tomorrow. This is such a privilege to do every weekend. Even if you run in the Trucks Series or the Xfinity Series or Super Late Models, it’s such a privilege to get to drive a race car.
“I get the privilege to drive the No. 21 for Wood Brothers Racing. That to me is all you need, right? I’ve had a chance to do that for three years, to work with these guys for three years, learn all I can. I’m confident in myself as a driver that I can do things when I’m at my best. Tonight I feel I was at my best. I feel like it worked out.”