HAMPTON, Ga. — NASCAR fans might look at the box score after waking up to see the results from the Cup Series race at Atlanta’s EchoPark Speedway and think they missed nothing.

They’d be wrong.

Ryan Blaney won a thriller at nearly 2 a.m. local time after a long rain delay, capping off one of NASCAR’s best races of the season with a last-corner pass.

Though Blaney led 14 different times and dominated the race with 171 laps led, he needed a push from Christopher Bell off the final turn in overtime to prevail in a three-wide finish over Bubba Wallace and Carson Hocevar.

“Is it 2 a.m.?” Blaney asked a cheering crowd of fans who had stayed until the wee hours of Monday morning. “Past my bedtime. But it’s not past y’all’s.”

The late show was NASCAR’s drafting-style racing at its finest, with cars slicing and dicing while making three- and four-wide moves all night long. It cemented the Atlanta track’s reputation as NASCAR’s most entertaining circuit since it was reconfigured from a typical intermediate into a mini superspeedway in 2022.

Blaney’s 171 laps led were the most at a drafting-style track since Richard Petty in the 1964 Daytona 500 (although there were more laps available on Atlanta’s 1.5-mile track as opposed to Daytona’s 2.5 miles and Talladega’s 2.67 miles).

But at the white flag, it appeared someone else would win the race instead. The exciting young Hocevar, NASCAR’s most polarizing driver, was clear of a three-wide battle behind him. Except Hocevar was too far out, and Blaney caught him with a huge run from Wallace.

Wallace then went three-wide on the bottom, but dipped his tires below the double yellow out-of-bounds line. After Wallace initially finished second, NASCAR penalized the driver for going out of bounds and dropped him to 29th place instead.

“Unfortunate. It’s another race for Bubba Wallace and Company,” Wallace said, referring to the dark cloud which sometimes seems to hang over his No. 23 team.

Wallace, crew chief Charles Denike and 23XI Racing performance director Dave Rogers reviewed video of the finish in the garage on a laptop, then walked into the NASCAR office hauler to meet with officials. The meeting wrapped after 31 minutes, and the penalty stood.

“A penalty is a penalty,” Wallace said.

The redeye finish was due to a summertime Southern thunderstorm that rolled through after the first 108 laps of the race, causing a red flag delay of three hours and nine minutes. Finally, at 12:01 a.m. local time, the race returned back to the green flag with NASCAR announcing the intention to complete the entire race.

When the checkered flag eventually flew after 30 lead changes and seven cautions, it was one of NASCAR’s latest finishes of the last couple decades — 1:45 a.m. on Monday morning.

Compared to those who have vainly chased his tournament record for the past 68 years, Fontaine is a relative unknown to modern audiences. While Pele, Messi et al are rightly regarded as the best male players ever, Fontaine is now a piece of trivia.

But that is to play down the remarkable life and career of Fontaine – who, if he were playing in the modern day, would have represented a different country.

The 2026 quarter-final between France and Morocco was the Just Fontaine derby. He was born in Marrakesh in August 1933 – at the time, Morocco was a French protectorate.

Morocco gained independence two years before the 1958 World Cup, but by that time Fontaine was an established international footballer playing in the French leagues – so he represented Les Bleus.

And, as sports journalist and historian Philip Barker explained to BBC Sport, had all gone to plan for France, Fontaine would not have been starting games at the World Cup in Sweden at all.

“He was not actually first choice – a team-mate [Rene Bliard] got injured in a warm-up game,” explains Barker. “It was such a last-minute change, he had to borrow boots [from team-mate Stephane Bruey] for the opening game as he didn’t have any to fit him.

“Imagine something like that now, so very different to what we have today.

“Fontaine had an operation on his meniscus [cartilage in his knee] during the season, so he had been a doubt for the tournament. But it meant he came to the tournament fresh – a lot of the other players had had a long hard season.”