2003 Daytona 500
45th iteration of Daytona 500
The 2003 Daytona 500, the 45th running of the event, was the first race of the 2003 NASCAR Winston Cup season, having been held on February 16 at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. 2000 NASCAR Busch Series champion Jeff Green won his second career Winston Cup pole.
Prior to the race, the drivers paid tribute by having decals on their cars in honor of the astronauts who were killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster two weeks earlier, similar to the 1986 Daytona 500, in which they paid tribute to the fallen crew members of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition, the Pledge of Allegiance and pre-race opening invocation given by the Reverend Hal Marchman, in his next-to-last running of the event before his retirement and subsequent death, were recited. Grammy Award-winning artist Mariah Carey then performed the national anthem.
The race ended after 109 laps when rain had begun pouring on the track. Michael Waltrip won the race for the second time in three years, giving him his third NASCAR Winston Cup win; all of his wins to that point had been in races held at Daytona. It was the first of Waltrip's two wins in 2003, both coming in restrictor plate races (he later won the EA Sports 500 at Talladega in October for his fourth and last Cup win). For the first time since 1966, the race was stopped due to rain; at 272.5 miles, it had been the shortest Daytona 500 ever.
During lap 58 into the race, Ryan Newman had an accident in the tri-oval, where his No.
“2003 Daytona 500” enters the record as 45th iteration of Daytona 500. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Daytona, 45th and iteration can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4601278. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2000, 1986 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “2003 Daytona 500” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.