Geoffrey Bodine drove from deep in the pack and avoided all the chaos and carnage to finish tenth in the Florida Dodge Dealers 250 at the Daytona International Speedway on Friday. Bodine, who started 32nd, was fifteenth after the completion of the first lap, and ran with the lead pack all night in the Team EJP Racing Chevrolet, eventually finishing 1.936 seconds behind race winner Carl Edwards. The truck Bodine drove in the race was the same truck that suffered moderate suspension and body damage in a crash that ended the first practice of the day on Thursday.

In the middle stages of the event, Bodine was forced to avoid several accidents that left many contenders with damaged trucks.

"Man, those guys were absolutely crazy out there tonight," Bodine said after the race. "It started very early. We got rammed on the first or second lap, and I had to ask my brother Brett what happened. They all seemed to want to win the race on the first lap, and it is a 100-lap race. It resulted in a lot of crashed trucks."

While missing all of the action on the track, Bodine and the Team EJP Racing Team didn't totally shake the bad side of Lady Luck. After returning to green flag racing after a multi-truck pileup on lap 59, Bodine dropped from his third position on the restart to 15th place.

"It looks like we had a tire pressure build up, which caused the truck to become almost undriveable," Bodine said. "It was very loose, and had no grip at all with the rear tires. We had been shaken out of the draft and it looked like we were down for the count when we caught a caution. It was the break we needed to come in and change tires and get the problem fixed. After that, the truck drove great and we raced our way right back up to the front pack."

With the problems corrected, Bodine was the able to concentrate on putting himself in the best possible position for the late-race shootout for the win.

"We were drafting with some pretty good trucks," he said, "but it just seemed like no one would help anyone out there. We were knocking on the door of a top-5 finish, but we lost our dancing partners and ended up with a tenth-place finish out of it. Considering what we went through on Thursday and all the work these guys did to get this truck back in condition just to make laps, much less compete for the lead and the win, we had an amazing day."