2012 Daytona 500: Defending Champ Trevor Bayne Will Be Non-Factor Throughout

Defending Daytona 500 champion Trevor Bayne will be forgotten as quickly as he was made famous after winning last year's legendary racing event. 

All signs point to Bayne being a non-factor from start to finish on Sunday.

The 21-year-old has just 18 Sprint Cup starts under his belt heading into the weekend's Daytona 500 (1 p.m. ET, FOX), and failed to finish better than 15th at any Sprint Cup event after taking to victory lane at Daytona International Speedway a year ago.

Bayne will start from the 40th spot on Sunday, which does not bode well for Bayne, considering he already defied the odds once to win from 32nd in 2011.

Starting so far back will make Bayne easy prey for the fast and dangerous surfaces of Daytona, where the big one is inevitable and always right around the corner.

Bayne's Nationwide series success has also been limited. In 79 Nationwide starts, Bayne has just one win to his name, while his average finish has moved from only 18th to 14th from 2009 to 2011.

Winning the Daytona 500 at age 20 is quite an accomplishment, after all no one younger than that has ever won there, but it is also an excellent reason to suggest that Bayne will be out of the late-race equation, unless he is among lapped traffic towards the end.

Bayne is not accustomed to being in the front, after all he has led just 11 laps in 18 career Sprint Cup races, and eight of those came in the 2011 Daytona 500, which he won.

He's only 21 years old and incredibly inexperienced at the Cup level. It's not a knock on Bayne to proclaim that he will be all but a memory during Sunday's Daytona 500 broadcast, but rather an honor for such a young driver who was fortunate a year ago to outlast 42 other drivers in a caution-filled sprint at Daytona.