We did a fuel only stop, we did not change tires on this stop. Tire wear at Daytona is not really an issue, the tire will give up a little speed after 50 laps or so, but you don't have to worry about wearing the tire through and blowing them out. After some quick gas mileage calculations, we came to the conclusion that by stopping so early we were going to come up about 5 laps short of the end of the race. By doing a fuel only stop we gained a bunch of track position over the guys who changed tires. What frequently happens when you have a stop like this and the field gets jumbled up, is we have a hard time getting back into a long green run.
Somebody usually gets impatient and causes a wreck.
It took several yellows to get things sorted out and get back to racing. This was helping our fuel mileage, by lap 65 of the 80 lap race we had ran enough yellow flag laps that we were going to be very close to making it to the end of the race on fuel. When the final caution flew , we were prepared to stop if the leaders stopped, but felt as if we could make it to the end of the race. When the checkered flag flew we had finished 13th out of 24 cars on the lead lap. There was about 1.5 gallons of fuel left in the car, or about enough for 4 laps.