Mike Wallace, 65 and widowed, takes aim at 2025 Daytona 500 as NASCAR season approaches

You looking for a longshot in this year’s Daytona 500? A potential feel-good story?

How ’bout if it’s also a guy with a reputation for comfort in big-pack racing with a couple of wins at the World Center of Racing?

Oh, also, he’s a 65-year-old widower.

Carl Long, a here-and-there team owner in NASCAR, announced Thursday he’s hired Mike Wallace — of the previous generation’s racing Wallace brothers — to enter the 2025 Daytona 500 in the team’s No. 66 Ford.

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In a press release, Wallace said he’s excited to return to the Daytona 500 after “being away for a few years.”

A few years?

Rusty’s little brother has raced at Daytona once in the past 18 years, and that was a decade ago. To his credit, Mike was a comfortable fit in superspeedway pack-racin’ and recorded top-10s in over a quarter of his Daytona Cup Series starts (5-for-19). He last raced NASCAR in 2020, when he entered three Xfinity races.

He’s won twice at Daytona, once in the Xfinity Series and once in a truck, in Daytona’s inaugural Truck Series race in 2000, best known for Geoff Bodine’s death-defying crash.

NASCAR Wallace brothers have a long history

Mike’s brother, Kenny, ran his last Daytona 500 in 2008. Big brother Rusty, a NASCAR Hall of Famer, ended his career in 2005 with 55 career Cup wins.

The Wallace brothers are from the St. Louis area and raced a ton of Cup Series races together on the same Sundays. Needless to say, Mike might be the only brother going green on Feb. 16 at Daytona for the 67th running of the Great American Race.

And it would come 13 months after he lost his wife of 44 years, Carla, who died of cancer last January.

This past year, Mike Wallace said, was a devastating year, but “2025 brings fresh excitement, starting with this Daytona 500 announcement. They say you have to be in it to win it, and we are rolling into Daytona with the chance to both be a part of and then race to win the Daytona 500!”

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NASCAR: 65 and widowed? Mike Wallace takes aim at 2025 Daytona 500