{"id":457922,"date":"2026-02-06T16:33:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T16:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/457922\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T16:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T16:33:07","slug":"countdown-to-the-daytona-500-9-days-to-go-speedway-digest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/457922\/","title":{"rendered":"Countdown to the DAYTONA 500: 9 days to go &#8211; Speedway Digest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When Bill Elliot won the 1985 DAYTONA 500 in the No. 9 Melling Racing Ford Thunderbird, it was the first time in 27 editions of the Great American Race that a driver in a car with a single-digit number had earned the Harley J. Earl Trophy. The victory took on extra significance for Elliott as the first Crown Jewel event in the first year of the Winston Million program. Elliott went on to win two of the three remaining Crown Jewel races (The Winston 500 at Talladega and the Southern 500 at Darlington) to claim the seven-figure prize and add the nickname \u201cMillion Dollar Bill\u201d to his resume.<\/p>\n<p>Tune-in to the 2026 DAYTONA 500 on Sunday, February 15 at 2:30 p.m. ET on FOX, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Bill Elliot won the 1985 DAYTONA 500 in the No. 9 Melling Racing Ford Thunderbird, it was&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,925,19546,10221,374,634,582,56524,82],"class_list":["post-457922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-daytona","tag-daytona-500","tag-ford","tag-fox","tag-nascar","tag-racing","tag-southern-500","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}