Fresh from his hospital stay, Ryan Newman watched the final lap of the 2020 Daytona 500 pretty much like everyone else had days earlier — in abject horror while holding out hope.
Newman, the victim of a horrific, life-threatening crash that gripped the sports world for 48 hours, had survived. He could barely fathom how after what he’d just witnessed.
“As I watched in the next, call it 24 hours, as I watched the crash and had to make myself believe what I had went through,” Newman recalled Thursday. “I really looked to my dad to say, ‘Hey, did this really happen?