Speeding away from Hendrick Motorsports teammate Kasey Kahne after a restart on Lap 81 of 90, Johnson won the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series all-star exhibition race for a record fourth time, beating charging Joey Logano to the stripe by 1.722 seconds.

Kyle Busch, who won the second and third segments of 20-laps each, ran third, followed by Kahne and Kurt Busch. The elder Busch brother won the first and fourth segments and was first onto pit road before the final dash but exited fifth with a less-than-stellar pit stop.

Despite changes to his pit crew this week, Johnson’s over-the-wall gang performed an 11-second pit stop that got him out of the pits on the front row, beside Kahne, for the final restart. Ultimately, that made all the difference.

With the victory, Johnson broke a tie with teammate Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Sr. for most wins in the non-points race, won his second straight All-Star Race and collected $1 million for his efforts.

“To beat Jeff and Earnhardt, two guys I’ve looked up to my whole life—two massive icons of our sport—this means the world to me,” said Johnson, who started 18th after sliding through his pit box and drawing a penalty for a loose lug nut during Friday’s qualifying session.

“I really didn’t think we had a shot at winning tonight, starting (18th), but we had a great race car and worked our way through there and got the job done. Over time, honestly, it’s just dedication and drive from every member at Hendrick Motorsports, every member on this No. 48 team. We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished, but we know we’ve got to keep pushing harder and pushing one another.”

Kyle Busch thought he had the fastest car, but a slower-than-usual four-tire stop put his No. 18 Toyota on the second row for the final restart.

“We just didn’t get the best pit stop there at the end to get us out on the front row, and when you’re back behind cars, you’re getting beat up on,” Busch said. “It is what it is. We’ll just take this as a good learning day and hopefully bring back some speed like this to the (Coca-Cola) 600 (May 26).”

NASCAR’s luck with weather held Saturday night, with a large enough window to complete the race with just one delay.

With Kurt Busch leading from the outset, NASCAR called a caution because of rain after Lap 8 and red-flagged the race after 13 laps when the shower intensified. The drivers came to pit road, parked in their stalls and waited.

The rain didn’t come soon enough, however, to save reigning Cup champion Brad Keselowski. On the second lap, transmission troubles sent his No. 2 Penske Racing Ford to the garage.

“Something just broke in the back half of the drive train, either the transmission or drive shaft gear – I’m not sure which one – but it’s one of those deals, unfortunately,” Keselowski said. “We’ll try to learn from it and move on.”

With Keselowski in the garage, the race resumed after a stoppage of 41 minutes 28 seconds. Kurt Busch pulled away from brother Kyle Busch to win the first 20-lap segment by .751 seconds.

Kyle Busch kept the second segment in the family, pulling away from Clint Bowyer after a restart on Lap 29—after Ricky Stenhouse Jr. bounced off the Turn 4 wall and knocked Mark Martin for a loop through the grass in the quad-oval.

Jamie McMurray led wire-to-wire to win the Sprint Showdown and transfer into the main event. McMurray, who started second, took two tires during the halfway competition caution after 20 laps and pulled away to beat Cup rookie Stenhouse to the finish line by 1.226 seconds.

Stenhouse transferred into the All-Star Race as the second-place finisher. His romantic interest, Danica Patrick, finished ninth in the Showdown but punched her ticket into the All-Star Race as the winner of the Sprint Fan vote.

“Obviously being out front is massive,” McMurray said during the break between the Showdown and the main event. “When I got by (polesitter) Martin (Truex Jr.) at the start of the race… I was trying to take it easy because I didn’t know with the track being green how quickly the tires would fall off, and even running at like 80 percent it was amazing what a difference just being in clean air was.

“I had a really good car in practice (Friday). I thought honestly the 56 (Truex) and I had the two best cars looking at times yesterday, and then the two tire stop was the right call for us. It got us up front.”

McMurray’s words proved prophetic. Being out front for the final 10-lap run was crucial to Johnson’s record run.

With a push from teammate Kasey Kahne, Smith roared out of the pack during the final 400 yards of a green-white-checkered-flag finish and won a race decided when NASCAR called the seventh and final caution an instant before the four cars battling for the win crossed the finish line.

Smith was the leader as the field was frozen when NASCAR called the caution. Kahne was first across the stripe but was scored in third place behind Smith and Joey Logano, who were the two lead drivers when the caution lights came on.

This was the same Regan Smith who was deprived of victory in a race he thought he had won at Talladega in 2008, when NASCAR demoted him to the 18th position for passing Tony Stewart below the yellow boundary line as the cars approached the checkered flag.

“I was having flashbacks, sitting on pit road–I’m not going to lie–when they were making the decision,” Smith said. “I was like ‘Man, I hope we got it–I’m pretty sure we got it when the flag came out and I saw the lights come on… They only thing I didn’t know was if they took it all the way to the stripe.

“I don’t know if it’s vindication or not. I think I’d gotten over that and gotten past that, but I definitely wanted to win here … but you want to win every week, and it definitely helps wipe that bad memory away of sitting on pit road and finding out you’re 18th instead. So, yeah, that was kind of cool.”

Smith took over the series lead, by 27 points over Sam Hornish Jr. in a race whose start was delayed three hours because of rain. It’s the first time JR Motorsports has led the Nationwide Series standings. It was also the first victory as a crew chief for Greg Ives.

Kahne was surprised NASCAR called the final caution instead of letting the race play out to conclusion.

“I think there’s been plenty of times (when) there’ve been wrecks in (Turn) 4 or 3, and we’ve just raced to the line at the end,” Kahne said. “As soon as they started wrecking, I saw the caution. I still raced to the line, and we had a good enough run to get there and be first there, but I was surprised the caution came out.

“I knew I was third when the caution came out, and I knew I was first at the line… My spotter after the race was like, ‘I think we won,’ but I was thinking the whole time, ‘There’s no way. The caution was out.’”

Busch was leading on Lap 93 when contact between Hornish’s Ford and Eric McClure’s Toyota ignited a spectacular 12-car wreck that sidelined the series leader entering the race (Hornish), among others.

NASCAR then opted to shorten the race by 10 laps because of impending darkness, but four laps after a restart on Lap 101, Joey Coulter’s contact with the outside wall caused the sixth caution and set up the two-lap dash to the finish.

On Lap 14, Danica Patrick spun off the bumper of series rookie Kyle Larson, her Turner Scott Motorsports teammate-for-a-day and slid though the waterlogged infield grass, damaging her No. 34 Chevrolet extensively. After losing a lap on pit road, Patrick brought the car to the garage and called it a day.

Patrick, hardly a grizzled veteran herself, attributed the wreck to Larson’s inexperience with the tandem racing that characterizes the Nationwide Series at restrictor-plate tracks. Larson, who was attempting to push Patrick’s car when the wreck occurred, found trouble of his own on Lap 35, when he blew a tire, spun and took Jeffrey Earnhardt’s Ford with him.

The hardest hit of the race, however, came on Lap 71 when pole sitter Travis Pastrana nosed into the outside backstretch wall during a three-car incident that started when Brian Scott turned the Ford of Reed Sorenson.

Sorenson hit the outside wall and spun back across the track into Pastrana’s path. Pastrana blamed himself for being in harm’s way and for not reacting quickly enough when he saw Sorenson spin.

“I just get an award for being stupid,” Pastrana said after leaving the infield care center. “We had the two fastest cars on the track (with Roush Fenway Racing teammate Trevor Bayne). We could have been a half-lap down just pushing each other, not worrying about anything.

“We all said we were going to sit back the whole race, and then, all of sudden, we’re up there racing just like a bunch of fools up front… Everything kind of happened.”

Yes, it was Busch’s 25th victory in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Yes, Busch broke a 31-race drought. Yes, Busch gave Joe Gibbs Racing and Toyota their first victory at Auto Club Speedway.

Yes, race runner-up Dale Earnhardt Jr. leaves California with the Cup series lead, 12 points ahead of 23rd-place finisher Brad Keselowski.

But it was the banging between polesitter Hamlin and Logano — the renewal of a feud that started last Sunday in Bristol — as well as an angry confrontation between Stewart and Logano on pit road that stole attention from Busch’s milestone win. Stewart took umbrage at a block by Logano on the final restart with 11 laps left in the 200-lap event.

“I did win the race today,” Busch quipped. “That might be a story… They (Hamlin and Logano) were so focused on each other that they left the door open.”

His momentum broken by the block, Stewart fell through the field and finished 22nd. Earnhardt was second when caution froze the field on the final lap. Logano was credited with third, followed by Carl Edwards and Kurt Busch, who overcame a brush with the wall and a pit road penalty to post his second straight top five.

Hamlin nosed hard into the inside wall and was credited with a 25th-place finish. The driver of the No. 11 Toyota was airlifted to a local hospital as a precautionary measure. A helicopter was used because of heavy post-race traffic outside the speedway.

As Logano put it later, the driver of the No. 22 Penske Racing Ford was simply trying to do whatever was necessary to win the race. That applied both to the block of Stewart and the battle with Hamlin.

“Racing for the lead — going for the win,” Logano said. “That’s what you’ve got to do… Tony was just upset about a restart, that I was racing him really hard on the bottom trying to make sure I protected my spot. What I was doing actually was I was racing the 18 (Kyle Busch) on the restart and he was spinning his tires.

“The rule is you can’t beat him to the start finish line, so I am pedaling it which gave Tony the run to go underneath me. I wanted to block that because I knew, if he put me three-wide, that would be the end of my race and I wouldn’t win. I was smart enough to realize that. Then I had to just do what I had to do to get to the front and try to win the race.”

Stewart had a substantially different view of the incident.

“For a guy that’s been complaining about how everyone else is driving here, and him to do that, it’s a double standard,” Stewart said. “He makes the choice. He makes the decision to run us down there (to the apron), and when you run a driver down there, you take responsibility for what happens after that.

“He’s a tough guy on pit road, as soon as one of his crew guys gets in the middle of it. Until then, he’s a scared little kid.”

A caution on lap 170 for Marcos Ambrose’s blown left-rear tire followed almost immediately a round of green-flag pit stops and wiped out Busch’s five-second lead over Harvick. That set up a restart on Lap 175 with Busch on the outside and Harvick beside him in the inside lane.

Harvick, however, failed to launch on the restart, allowing Kahne to move into second with Stewart behind him. One lap later, Mark Martin’s spin off Turn 2 brought out the seventh caution and bunched the field for a restart on Lap 181.

Kyle Busch pulled away once again, but the engine in Clint Bowyer’s Toyota exploded on Lap 185, giving cars running ninth on back a chance to pit for fresh tires in hopes of gaining ground on a final charge to the finish.

Kyle Busch paced the field to a restart on Lap 190 with Logano beside him, despite overheating issues that threatened his chances for a strong finish. Stewart was third and Kurt Busch fourth when the field took the green.

Stewart was the biggest loser on the restart, thanks to the block Logano threw on the No. 14 car as the field stormed through Turn 1. Logano got the better of Kyle Busch on lap 194, as Hamlin streaked through the field on fresh tires to move into second.

Just past the finish line on Lap 199, Hamlin moved to the outside of Logano, and the drivers banged doors repeatedly until the contact sent Hamlin spinning and Logano into the outside wall, allowing Kyle Busch to steal the win.

“This is one of those tracks that, as a driver, you feel like you really need to win at,” said Kahne, who snagged the lead on a final restart with 40 laps left and held off both Kyle Busch and Keselowski in Sunday’s Food City 500.

“We’ve been trying for a long time. To pull it off, I feel is a big accomplishment for our guys and myself. There are so many things that are thrown at you when you come to this place. We’d been fast here other times and not able to finish the deal.”

Kahne, now seventh in the points standings, had finished no better than fifth in any of his previous 10 Cup races at Bristol.

The final restart came after Kahne’s Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson blew a tire, bringing out the race’s 10th caution.

Prior to the final green-flag run, Kahne and Keselowski had staged a furious short-track duel that rekindled memories of the door-to-door racing that made Bristol famous.

“I’m (thinking) how can I get by and he’s (thinking) how can I hold this guy off,” Kahne said. “I reeled him in, but he was driving into the corners so hard, I really couldn’t do anything on the bottom. I bumped him a few times. He was sideways a few times trying to hold us back.

“I felt like we got a really good restart, got the lead and, from there, it was just momentum and trying to drive away.”

Keselowski knew he was in trouble after spinning wheels on the final restart and watching Kahne set sail.

“I don’t think I had anything for Kasey. I don’t know if anyone did,” said Keselowski, the defending race champion who finished third. “He was so good through the middle, really everywhere. He was kind of in a league of his own.”

Kahne credited his team, led by crew chief Kenny Francis.

“It’s fun to come to pit road and break even or gain spots,” he said. “The guys have just been nailing it on pit road.”

Not everyone made up ground in the pits.

Busch, who won the pole in track record time on Friday, posted the fastest laps in both of Saturday’s practice sessions and then won Saturday’s NASCAR Nationwide Series event, led the first 55 laps before a pit-road speeding violation under caution shuffled him back to 32nd. He was undaunted in his recovery, clawing his way back to 16th in the next 40 laps and moving to second behind teammate Denny Hamlin on Lap 155 after the race’s fourth caution.

“We battled back. I wish I could have kept up with the 5 (Kahne), but he took off and left us all,” Busch said.

Hamlin led 117 of the first 189 laps before surrendering the lead in the pits to teammate Matt Kenseth, who suffered his own misfortune when race leader Jeff Gordon blew a right front tire on Lap 391. Gordon climbed the track with his tire going down and Kenseth had nowhere to go, slamming into the rear of Gordon.

“Not a lot either one of us could do about that,” said Kenseth, resigned to a 35th-place finish.

Joey Logano, who started 10th, had been making steady progress and was challenging Gordon for the lead on Lap 348 when he tangled with Hamlin, his former JGR teammate. That led to a post-race exchange between Logano, Hamlin and team members.

Asked if he and Hamlin had a problem, Logano replied: “If we didn’t, we do now.”

Keselowski’s third-place finish vaulted him to the lead in the Sprint Cup point standings, nine points ahead of Dale Earnhardt Jr., who finished sixth after qualifying 32nd.

Johnson, who entered as the points leader, finished 22nd after running in the top 10 most of the day and fell to third in the standings. Kurt Busch finished fourth, his best showing for Furniture Row Racing, and Clint Bowyer was fifth.

The victory was the 61st of Johnson’s career in his 400th start in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and his second win in NASCAR’s most prestigious race.

Earnhardt finished second for the third time in the last four Daytona 500s. Mark Martin ran third, followed by defending series champion Brad Keselowski and Ryan Newman. Greg Biffle ran sixth and Regan Smith seventh.

Polesitter Danica Patrick came home eighth, the best-ever finish by a woman in the Daytona 500.

With tandem racing all but absent in the points race for the new Gen-6 race cars, passing was difficult and track position paramount.

“You can’t ride and wait for things to happen,” Johnson said. “You have to race all day long and fight for track position. This race car, this Lowe’s Chevrolet was so good. (Crew chief) Chad Knaus and all of Hendrick Motorsports had me a fast car, and I could really stay up front all day long. I had a lot of confidence in the final few laps leading the train, (because) I knew just how fast the car was.”

Earnhardt got a strong push from Martin on the last lap, but couldn’t catch Johnson off the final corner.

“I couldn’t have done much without Mark helping me here at the end,” said Earnhardt, who was fourth at the white flag. “I was hoping he was thinking what I was thinking as we come off of Turn 2 on that last lap. I felt like we needed to make the move a little earlier than off (Turn) 4.

“I kept backing up, backing up, trying not to let guys get racing behind us too much. If somebody ducked out of line a couple rows behind Mark, I was going to have a gap, (and) me and Mark could take off, not get hung up with those guys. Once we come off of 2, mashed the gas, got a run on Danica, side-drafted her a little bit.

“I don’t know why them guys didn’t pull down in front of me besides Jimmie, but we got through 3 and 4 with a pretty good run. Once we come to Turn 4, we kind of run out of steam, didn’t have enough to get a run on Jimmie.”

After a restart on Lap 182, following the fifth caution of the race for Jeff Burton’s hard contact with the outside wall at the entrance to the tri-oval, Keselowski and Johnson ran side-by-side at the front of the pack, trading the lead as their respective lanes gained momentum.

A caution for debris on Lap 192 set up the six-lap dash to the finish with Johnson in the lead in the outside lane.

Patrick made history when she led the field to green from the pole position. On Lap 90, she reached another milestone. Surging to the lead after a restart, she paced the field on Laps 90 and 91, and, in doing so, became the first female driver to lead a lap in the Daytona 500 and the first female to lead a green-flag Lap in the Cup series.

(Janet Guthrie led Laps 43 through 47 under caution in the Nov. 20, 1977, Los Angeles Times 500 at Ontario Motor Speedway, the only five laps she led in 33 career Cup starts.)

Later in the race, Patrick led three more laps, for a total of five, to tie Guthrie’s five.

Despite the success, Patrick was reluctant to reset expectations for her rookie season in the Cup series.

“I think that would be unwise to sort of start telling myself that top 10 is where we need to be every week,” said Patrick, who was third with one lap left but fell to eighth in the last-lap scramble. “I think that’s setting up for failure. The list of drivers in the Cup series is deep. This is a unique track. These (restrictor-plate) tracks are different and unique. (It’s) a lot about the car.

“I mean, you have to be smart enough to do the right thing at the right time, but it’s very much about the car. I feel like I’m still sticking to ‘Let’s see how these first five races go,’ where we go to a bunch of different kinds of tracks, see where we settle in, start to establish goals from there on out.”

The Toyota Camrys of Joe Gibbs Racing were running 1-2-3 as the race neared the three-quarter mark, with Matt Kenseth pacing Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch. On Lap 150, however, Kenseth, who led four times for a race-high 86 laps, brought his car to pit road, having felt a vibration in the drive train. Busch parked his car two laps later, with a blown engine.

That left Hamlin at the point as the field ran single-file behind him, in a lull before the late-race pyrotechnics.

A nine-car accident on Lap 138, thinned an already depleted field. With most cars running single-file around the top of the track, Keselowski tapped David Reutimann and dropped abruptly to the apron in Turn 1.

That triggered a melee as cars checked up behind Keselowski. Carl Edwards was a victim of the accident, as ill fortune at Daytona continued to haunt the driver who already had wrecked four cars at Daytona this year.

Other casualties included 2011 Daytona 500 winner Trevor Bayne and Ricky Stenhouse Jr., making his first start as a full-time Cup driver in the No. 17 Roush Fenway Racing Ford Fusion.

The first major wreck of the race — on Lap 33 as the double-file lead pack of cars exited the tri-oval — dashed the hopes of former Daytona 500 winners Kevin Harvick and Jamie McMurray, as well as those of pre-race favorites Tony Stewart and Kasey Kahne.

As the field stacked up toward Turn 1, Kyle Busch tagged the back of Kahne’s car, turning Kahne into Juan Pablo Montoya’s Chevrolet SS and igniting a nine-car incident that also damaged the cars of Keselowski, Kurt Busch and Casey Mears.

Keselowski suffered damage to the both sides of his Ford, pinballing off both Montoya and Harvick, but was able to continue. Kurt Busch lost a lap on pit road with the nose of his Chevy caved in from contact during the wreck. Casey Mears, who had qualified 17th, also sustained significant damage.

Note: Other drivers who have won their 400th Cup starts include Lee Petty, Richard Petty, David Pearson, Dave Marci’s and Dale Earnhardt.

Harvick passed Trevor Bayne on lap 37 to take the lead of Duel 1. He led the remaining 23 laps.

Danica Patrick, who will start the 500 from the pole, played it safe and dropped to the back early on to ensure her car would not sustain damage.

Greg Biffle, Juan Pablo Montoya, Jimmie Johnson, and Kurt Busch rounded out the top 5 of Duel 1.

The first duel was relatively uneventful until lap 52 when Denny Hamlin appeared to get loose and bumped Carl Edwards.  Edwards was turned into the wall triggering a multi-car accident that damaged the cars of Hamlin, Edwards, Trevor Bayne, and Regan Smith.

Kyle Busch used a fuel-only pit stop at lap 41 to take the lead coming off pit road. He ran most of the remaining laps with teammate Matt Kenseth behind him. But, with two laps to go, Kasey Kahne and Austin Dillon were able to pass Kenseth. They couldn’t mount a charge to pass Busch, though.

Busch said after the race that the original plan was to take two tires, but his crew chief made the call to go fuel-only.

Kahne, Dillon, Clint Bowyer, and Kenseth finished second through fifth, respectively.

Jeff Gordon, who will start the 500 on the front row, led the first 40 laps of Duel 2, before a pass-through penalty for speeding on pit road ended his chances of winning the duel.

Martin Truex Jr, who ran in the lead pack for most of Duel 2, was black-flagged for losing a side window. He finished 19th. Mike Bliss also had to make a pit stop to fix his window net, which came down. That cost him a chance at making the Daytona 500. Brian Keselowski was the only other driver who did not qualify for the race.

On the last lap in what was the debut race for NASCAR’s Gen-6 race car, Harvick blocked Stewart on the inside and moved back up the track to block Biffle, who was perilously close to sending Harvick’s No. 29 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet into the fence.

Biffle ran second, Joey Logano took third, and Stewart — his momentum broken by Harvick’s block — finished fourth. Matt Kenseth finished fifth in his first competition for Joe Gibbs Racing.

Harvick’s victory was his third in five races, following back-to-back wins in 2009 and 2010. Though Harvick will leave RCR at the end of the season to drive for Stewart-Haas Racing next year, he said the impending job change is of no consequence on the track.

“I think it’s one of those deals, where, for us, it’s about winning races,” Harvick said in Victory Lane. “The politics and everything are one thing, but when we get to the race track, it’s about sitting in this race car, making it as fast as it will go.”

Harvick may not have had the fastest car — in fact, he thought the Stewart’s Chevy SS and Kenseth’s Camry were slightly better — but he made the critical moves at precisely the right times, particularly when it came to blocking Biffle.

“In the middle segment, I could tell that Biffle was backing up and trying to time what his move was going to be as we got further into the segment,” Harvick said. “So I was working on my timing to kind of back up and block that.

“Those guys (Biffle and Logano) were coming on the outside, and I don’t know if the 14 (Stewart) and the 16 (Biffle) were side-by-side, but I just felt like I needed to move up and block that momentum, and we were able to block two of those moves.”

Biffle said he thought about trying the outside lane entering the final corner but wasn’t sure he had enough room.

“I thought about sticking it in there, and it just didn’t look like it was going to work to me,” Biffle said. “It looked like it would be sparks and parts flying. He shut the door on the top. That’s what Kevin needed to do to win the race. I looked in the mirror and didn’t have anyone pushing me.”

An incident-free 25-lap second segment, won by Harvick over Biffle, set the starting order for the final 20-lap dash for the victory. By the end of the segment both Carl Edwards and Dale Earnhardt Jr. had lost touch with the 10-car pack ahead of them, but caution between the second and final segments bunched the field for a restart on Lap 56 of 75.

The first segment, on the other hand, featured plenty of action.

On Lap 15, the halfway point, a nine-car incident ruined the winning chances of nearly a third of the field. Stewart turned down across the nose of Marcos Ambrose’s Ford near the apex of Turns 1 and 2. Stewart saved his No, 14 Chevrolet, but drivers behind him checked up, seeing sparks trailing from the rear of Stewart’s car.

The ensuing wreck destroyed the cars of Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin, Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin. Martin Truex Jr.’s Toyota was nicked in the melee, but he was able to continue, as were Stewart and Ambrose.

In fact, Stewart’s car was fast to enough to take the lead on the final lap of the first segment, and he held it to the finish line. During the planned caution between segments, the 12 remaining cars came to pit road for mandatory four-tire stops — a requirement dictated by a fan vote.

Fans voted to set the starting lineup for the race according to the chronological order in which drivers won their poles. That put 2012 Daytona 500 pole winner Edwards in the top starting spot and Martin, winner of the pole at Phoenix the following week, on the outside of the front row.

Both Edwards and Martin, however, had to drop to the rear for the start, because neither driver practiced his back-up car after a wreck in Friday’s opening Sprint Unlimited practice forced a change of equipment. Accordingly, Kasey Kahne led the field to green, with Biffle beside him.

Kurt Busch will drive the No. 78 in the Sprint Cup Series this season, replacing Regan Smith. Smith will drive for JR Motorsports in the Nationwide Series.

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Veteran Mike “Tiny” Houston has been hired as pit crew coach. He will oversee the development of the crew. Houston previous served as front tire carrier for Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 88 Chevy and driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. He also served in the same role with the No. 24 team and Jeff Gordon and the No. 48 team and Jimmie Johnson.

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The team made a push to field two full time Nationwide teams in 2013, but it is becoming increasingly likely that the team will only field the No. 5 full time. A second car will be fielded on a limited basis with Dale Earnhardt Jr and other drivers behind the wheel.

That leaves Cole Whitt without a ride.

The No. 5 will feature sponsorship from TaxSlayer.com.

JRM General Manager Kelley Earnhardt Miller said:

Our goal is always to field two full-time teams  and that could still happen next year with other potential opportunities  but what we have right now is a strong team with Regan and Greg that will compete for a championship, and a part-time team with Dale Jr. that will compete for wins. Our focus is to streamline our company and equip those teams with everything they need to compete at a high level.

Smith signed with JRM after filling in for Earnhardt Jr in the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports Chevy while Earnhardt Jr recovered from concussions. Smith was told he would not be back with Furniture Row Racing earlier this year. FRR opted to hire Kurt Busch.

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