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Daytona Beach, Fla. • One Daytona win down, the big one to go.
Chase Elliott won the Xfinity Series season opener at Daytona International Speedway on Saturday, edging Joey Logano for his first victory at NASCAR's most famous track.
Elliott took the lead from Logano on a final restart with 13 laps to go and then blocked his fellow Sprint Cup regular on the last lap. Logano got a strong run on the outside a few hundred feet from the finish line and then banged the side of Elliott's No. 88 Chevrolet several times, but he couldn't get past.
Elliott calmly climbed out of his car, grabbed the checkered flag and then pumped his fist a few times in the air the kind of subdued celebration outsiders have grown to expect from the son of Hall of Famer Bill Elliott.
"It means a lot man," Elliott said. "This is Daytona. I'm just happy to be here. We still have 500 miles to go tomorrow. Lot of work to do here."
Elliott, a rookie in the Cup series, will start the Daytona 500 on the pole Sunday.
He can only hope to have as smooth a run. Elliott ran near the front for most of the 300-mile race, following Logano and Kasey Kahne around the high-banked speedway and waiting for his move.
It came late, when he got in front of Logano on the final restart.
Elliott edged Logano by 0.043 seconds. It was Logano's third second-place finish in three races during Speedweeks. He also was second in the exhibition Sprint Unlimited and one of the twin qualifying races.
"Dang it. I'm sick of finishing second," Logano said. "Too many seconds."
Kahne was third, followed by Elliott Sadler and pole-sitter Austin Dillon. Elliott, Kahne and Sadler gave JR Motorsports three of the top four spots.
Darrell Wallace Jr. was sixth, just ahead of Brandon Jones and Daniel Suarez.
The race was mostly clean, with just four cautions. It was quite different than recent years. Kyle Busch broke his right leg and left foot in a hard crash into a concrete wall last year in the Xfinity opener. Three years ago, Kyle Larson's car went airborne during a last-lap crash and spewed debris into the grandstands and injured fans.
It looked as if this one could have a wild ending, too, but Elliott and Logano kept their cars straight despite all the contact.
"The plan was to make the move off of (Turn 4) and going to the top he blocked the first move and wiggled to the bottom and back to the top," Logano said. "At that point it is a little late and then we touched each other and that is the killer. Once we had that touch, it killed our momentum and I couldn't pull him back enough to get in front of him."
It was Elliott's first victory at a restrictor-plate track.
"I just barely had enough to get in front of Joey there," Elliott said.