It’s time we put a nice little bow on the events of the Virginia paperclip from this past weekend.
I’ll be honest. Yesterday’s STP 500 was average for a race at Martinsville Speedway. It certainly wasn’t bad or one that I would include in my list of most disappointing races of 2016 (yet), but there wasn’t much of the action or bumping and banging we have come to expect. The rubber wasn’t laying down like Goodyear expected. From what I’ve been told, it was the cold temperatures that contributed to that. I think it’ll be different when we go back to Martinsville in October.
Kyle Busch finally earned his first grandfather clock this weekend after winning Saturday’s Alpha Energy Solutions 250 Camping World Truck Series race. He said after the race that he would put that clock in the foyer to see how long it would take Brexton to figure put how it chimes. He then followed that up by winning the Cup race and earning a second grandfather clock. When asked, he said he doesn’t know where he’ll put No. 2.
It was nothing short of a dominant performance by the driver of the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota this entire weekend. He led 123 of the 255 laps on Saturday and 352 of the 500 yesterday. That means of the 755 laps run this weekend, Busch led 475 of them (62.91 percent). Just to add to his performance yesterday, he had a 148.2 driver rating. That’s less than two-points short of a perfect rating.
I don’t know what they hit on this weekend, but they nailed their car this weekend and nobody was going to beat him.
AJ Allmendinger scored his best finish of the season with a runner-up in his No. 47 JTG Daugherty Racing Chevrolet.
He said that he “was hoping for one more spot for a culmination,” but that it was cool that he “passed Jimmie Johnson like five times at Martinsville.”
His performance caught me off guard because he just quietly stayed in the top-10 all day and made a great finish out of it. But then again, it’s been said that Martinsville is rhythm racing, like road course racing, and he’s pretty good when it comes to the road courses.
So far in 2016, he’s amassed two top-10 finishes and sits 12th in points.
Coming off a nasty wreck at Auto Club Speedway two weeks ago and going to a track where he never finished better than 19th, Kyle Larson surprised everyone with a podium finish in his No. 42 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet.
“In the past, it’s (Martinsville) been my worst racetrack on the schedule, so to get a top‑three finish here feels great, feels like a win, to be honest, and hopefully, this is a good momentum shift that we need,” Larson said. “We’ve been struggling all year long so far and been working hard, but it hasn’t paid off.”
While I not sure how much a good run at Martinsville will translate to a good run at Texas Motor Speedway this weekend, it’s great for Larson after his lackluster season so far.
Austin Dillon continued his strong run of great drives this season with a fourth-place finish. In addition, teammates Paul Menard finished eighth and Ryan Newman rounded out the top-10. More and more, I’m seeing Richard Childress Racing starting to resurge into possibly a winning organization again.
I’ll conclude this by addressing those people who threw beer cans onto the track after the race. Normally, I’d save this for “The White Zone,” but I already did one of those when I talked about those who did this same thing last fall at Talladega. But just like then, there’s no justification to throw objects on track. There are two main reasons: One, you run the risk of injuring someone with a full can of beer. Finally, you should never waste perfectly good beer. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, so I’ll end it here.
That about sums up the events of this weekend. Next up for the Sprint Cup Series is the Duck Commander 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.
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