DAYTONA BEACH, FL – FEBRUARY 21: Denny Hamlin, driver of the #11 FedEx Express Toyota, takes the checkered flag ahead of Martin Truex Jr., driver of the #78 Bass Pro Shops/Tracker Boats Toyota, to win the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series DAYTONA 500 at Daytona International Speedway on February 21, 2016 in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)

Denny Hamlin edged out Martin Truex Jr. at the finish line of the Daytona 500 on Sunday, winning the biggest race in NASAR by one-hundredth of a second, 0.010, per the NASCAR race results for the closest victory in history.

Put another way, in a race decided by 40 drivers going 500 miles the fastest, Hamlin won by half a foot.

In response to the photo finish, NASCAR posted a gallery of the closest finishes in race history, and before Sunday’s final lap, the narrowest margin came in 2007 when Kevin Harvick edged out Mark Martin by .020 seconds; an infinitesimal amount of time, and still double what the race on Sunday was decided by.

In 1959, the first Daytona 500 was decided by two feet, with Lee Petty nosing out Johnny Beauchamp. The average speed in that race was 135.5 mph. Things go a little bit faster these days, and this race was still that much closer.

Hamlin led the 2016 iteration of the 500 for 95 of 200 laps, but sat fourth as the white flag waved, needing to make one helluva move to pass race leader Matt Kenseth and his other Toyota teammates. Hamlin made his move to the outside coming out of turn two, and Kenseth whiffed on the block on turn three after Hamlin caught up to him on the back stretch, nearly putting himself into the wall as he rounded the race’s final turn before dropping back more than a dozen spots, to finish in 14th place.

It was Truex who benefited the most from Hamlin’s move, securing the lead on the inside lane while Hamlin had to navigate around Kenseth’s block. But the momentum from Kevin Harvick’s bump gave Hamlin enough of a push to get around turn four just about even with Truex, to barely inch out—literally, inch—his Toyota teammate at the line.

Daytona has been a race marred by late crashes and a green-white-checkered finish almost every year for the last half decade, so a good amount of the conversation in the Fox broadcast booth those last four laps was going over the rules for overtime and specualting if the leaders had enough fuel to handle extra laps.  What we got, instead, was one of the great final laps in Daytona 500 history, and one of the best finishes in all of racing.

One one-hundredth of a second.

Six inches.

There’s almost nothing in sports to compare that kind of finish to.

The only race that comes to mind with a finish that close wasn’t on the pavement, but in the pool, when American legend Michael Phelps overtook Milorad Cavic in the 100M butterfly at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

That race, won 50.58 to 50.59 by Phelps, was the closest possible finish in an Olympic event, but the entire race was under a minute. Last place finished just over a second behind the Olympic record. It’s hard to compare that to racing 500 miles and still coming to a finish this close.

In the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, American Gail Devers won the 100-meter dash in 10.82 in a race so close that favorite Merlene Ottey finished fifth…at 10.88. American Gwen Torrence finished with a time of 10.86—four hundredths of a second off the lead—and didn’t even medal.

That race was impossibly close, but like Phelphs’ victory, the nature of a sprint is such that close finishes are built in to the event. Last place in that race looked like half a mile behind the field and that runner lost the gold medal by less than half a second.

At Daytona, they race for four hours—200 laps across 500 miles—and while the caution flags conspire to bring the field closer together than if 40 cars were just driving down the highway together for 500 miles, still, to have a finish this close after that long is amazing.

The Daytona 500 finish was so close, it’s nearly impossible to register a comparison in traditional American sports, especially team sports. In the NBA, it was determined that it is physically impossible to shoot a basketball in less than 0.3 seconds and if the game clock is below that time, a team can only attempt a tip in. Even Steph Curry, who may have the fastest release in NBA history, needs about three tenths of a second to get a shot off. The NBA doesn’t bother recording time beyond tenths of seconds, so it is plausible that a player could tip the ball in with less than one tenth of a second to go. But the Daytona 500 was decided by one by one hundredth of a second. It’s incalculable.

In baseball, the fastest pitch ever recorded was from Aroldis Chapman, who hurled a ball in 2010 a recorded 105.1 mph. That means that in one hundredth of a second, the ball was barely across the front of the mound. Chapman’s pitch traveled just 18.5 inches in that time.

The fastest shot in NHL history was by Zdeno Chara, who rocketed a puck 108.8 mph in the All-Star Skills competition four years ago. So how far would that puck travel in one hundredth of a second? 19.13 inches. Yep, the hardest puck ever hit would travel less than two feet in the time difference between first and second place at the Daytona 500 this year.

One more, as the hardest soccer ball ever struck is allegedly set at 131 mph (though that number is highly disputed, as the second hardest is only 114 mph).

That ball would still travel less than two feet—23.056 inches—in the time it took between Hamlin and Truex to cross the finish line at Daytona.

If those numbers seem odd, what with the cars traveling close to 200 mph at the time they crossed the finish line, remember we aren’t talking about the speed of the cars in relation to the baseball, puck or soccer ball. We’re talking about the difference between first and second place, which is the speed between Hamlin’s car in relation to Truex’s car at the moment they crossed the line. That is pretty incredible.

Outside of sports, the time difference between first and second at Daytona gets even more incredible. Did you know the fastest torpedo in history goes about 100 meters per second, or one meter in the time difference between first and second. But did you also know that a torpedo only has a range of just over four miles, meaning it couldn’t have even completed two laps at Daytona, let alone win the whole race, even if it could turn left 800 times.

The fastest car on record traveled 763.035 miles per hour in 1997. Propelled by two jet engines, that vehicle topped out at faster than two tenths of a mile every second, or more than 11 feet in the time it took Hamlin to edge Truex.

Let’s get faster. Did you know the average human has a resting heartbeat of 60-100 beats per minute, which is, at best, one beat per second. If your heat skipped a beat when Hamlin passed Truex, it’s understandable. But a blue-throated hummingbird has a recorded heart rate of 1260 beats per minute, which is 21 beats per second, or less than a quarter of one beat in the time difference between Hamlin’s finish and that of Truex.

Last, just how close was the Daytona 500 finish? If you blinked, you literally might have missed it.

One hundredth of a second is 10 milliseconds, and the common time for a blink is between 300 and 400 milliseconds, or roughly 1/3rd of a second. There was a study in 2014 published by MIT, however, that found the human brain could process information the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds, nearly 10 times faster than what was previously believed.

And still, the finish to the Daytona 500, per the official NASCAR timing, was faster than the eye could see. Which means when someone says they had to see Hamlin’s win to believe it, there’s a good chance they couldn’t even actually, physically see it! The Daytona 500 finish was so close it was almost literally too close for the human eye to see.

However you saw it, and however fast it was, the finish was one of the closest in the history of sports, and as good as it gets in racing.

About Dan Levy

Dan Levy has written a lot of words in a lot of places, most recently as the National Lead Writer for Bleacher Report. He was host of The Morning B/Reakaway on Sirius XM's Bleacher Report Radio for the past year, and previously worked at Sporting News and Rutgers University, with a concentration on sports, media and public relations.