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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — He’s still just “Margaret and Leroy’s little boy,” but Michael Waltrip is pushing 54 and Sunday he’ll be making his final start in the Daytona 500.
“I just thought it was a cool place to run my last race,” Waltrip said during Wednesday’s annual media day at Daytona International Speedway.
It will be his 30th start in a race and at a place that still generates a wide range of emotions for the Owensboro, Kentucky, native.
His record of futility was a solid 462 races heading into the 2001 Daytona 500 when he finally made it to Victory Lane in his first start for Dale Earnhardt Inc.
Jubilation was short-lived. In a race that crowned a new Daytona 500 champion, the sport lost one of its biggest figures — team owner and seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt.
Waltrip, the younger brother of NASCAR Hall of Fame driver Darrell Waltrip, won the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series biggest race again in 2003. He won the summer race at Daytona in ’02 and the fall stop at Talladega the following year.
“I try not to get reflective or nostalgic because it’s too emotional,” he said of his Daytona memories. “Mostly I just think about getting to race the car. Obviously I have faced the range of emotions that humans probably aren’t designed to face and it all probably happened within 10 seconds, so that’s hard to think about.
“But I love coming to Daytona, I’ve been coming here since I was a kid, so every time you talk about coming to Daytona I get a big smile on my face which is crazy but that’s racing I guess.”
Outside the car, he works as a NASCAR analyst for FOX “and I’ve got great teammates there,” he said.
For 32 years he’s made at least one start in the series — the last time he ran a full schedule was ’09. He will suit up for a final time with help from long-time sponsor Aaron’s — they’ve been with him in some form or fashion for nearly two decades — and Premium Motorsports owner Jay Robinson in the team’s No. 15 Toyota
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“When we ran last year’s Daytona 500 (with BK Racing) it didn’t go well,” he said. “We didn’t run good and I guess we got in a little bit of a fender-bender and messed up the car. I didn’t want to quit like that. So I went to Talladega (with Premium) and we got a 12th-place finish, ran up front a little bit.
“Then I decided we would try to have one more competitive run down here. You’ve got to quit sometime.”
For Waltrip, sometime comes Sunday.
“When we close the books on this it will say 11 XFINITY Series wins and one Camping World Truck win and it will definitely say four Monster Energy NASCAR Cup wins, maybe it will say five,” he said. “But I qualified 35th so unless our strategy is we’ve got ’em right where we want ’em … we might be in a little bit of trouble on this one.
“But I’m looking forward to trying.”