It’s time to put a nice little bow on the events from this past weekend in Fort Worth, Texas.
For those of you not familiar with the rear view, I just realized how wrong that could sound out of context. Every Monday after a Sprint Cup Series race, I give my take on the drivers who made headlines from the weekend’s events.
Let’s start with one Kyle Thomas Busch.
The driver of the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota didn’t have the best car on Sunday morning, but he showed why he’s the best re-starter in the business when he took control of the lead with 32 laps to go and won the race. Granted, he was also helped by the leader not stopping for tires and I’ll touch on that in a moment, but he found himself in the right place at the right time and scored his 36th career victory.
Busch is on a roll with four straight combined wins in NASCAR’s top-three national touring series and I don’t expect that to slow down with the next stop on the schedule, Thunder Valley.
Jimmie Johnson, who came into this past weekend with three straight wins at Texas, was a non-factor the whole night as he drove his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet to a fourth-place finish. The highlight of his night was running into the rear-end of the eventual race winner on pit road under the first caution of the race.
“We overcame a lot today,” Johnson said. “On that first pit stop, everyone was checking up and I hammered the back of the 18. We had to fix damage on the nose, and it wasn’t pretty. There’s a big hole up front and that couldn’t have been helping us at all. There’s a lot of fight in this Lowe’s team today. I’m thankful for the great equipment and the fight that these guys have because with all the damage and adversity we went through tonight, to come home fourth is really good for this Lowe’s Chevrolet.”
After the race, he said the damage was “really bad. So I’m really glad we finished as well as we did.” The fact that he finished as great as he did was incredible indeed. Most drivers in that position would have given up.
Speaking of drivers in a predicament, Chase Elliott dropped to the rear of the field for a transmission change and still fought his way to a fifth-place finish. In vintage Elliott fashion, despite it being his career best finish, he’s still not satisfied.
“Yeah, it was a step in the right direction,” Elliott said. “We’re definitely not satisfied running fifth. I feel like we have a group of guys that are capable of doing that. We’ll keep digging at it. We have a long way to go with a lot of racing to go in the season. We’ll keep working to get where we can roll with those guys.”
I really wish the guy wouldn’t be so hard on himself. The sky is the limit for the son of 1988 Sprint Cup Series champion Bill Elliott and he’s going to win at some point this season.
Now we get to Martin Truex Jr. The driver of the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Toyota led 142 of the 334 laps, but opting to stay out on the second to last caution of the race was what ultimately cost him the victory.
“We just ran out of tires, you know,” Truex said of facing Busch on the final restart. “Made it through (turns) one and two side-by-side, got to three and just didn’t have the grip. Then we fell back because we were sliding around. Everybody had new tires, we ran under caution for a long time, they keep building air pressure and losing grip. Pretty big disadvantage, but can’t say enough about the guys for the race car they brought here and the weekend we had. It hurts. It’s happened a few times to me here. Hurts a little bit, but we’ll get over it and we’ll move on and we’ll take the positives out of it tonight.”
He said afterward that the original plan was to stay out, but Cole Pearn, Truex’s crew chief, called him in at the last second. Truex opted to stay out because he “didn’t want to hit the cone.”
“It’s just the way it goes,” Truex added. “Had we went green that next restart, we did OK. We got the lead and we drove away. We just kept getting yellows and caution laps and the tires just kept getting more air in them and more air in them. By the time we finally got moving there, we just didn’t have the grip everybody else had. Just sliding around. It’s frustrating, but that’s racing. That’s the way it goes sometimes.”
Growing up as a Jeff Gordon fan, I know what it’s like to see my driver dominate a race like Truex did and staying out cost him the win like at Martinsville in 2012. So I can feel his pain.
I saw him dominate in this fashion for four straight races last season and he finally made it to victory lane in the fourth at Pocono Raceway. If he continues to have great cars like this, he’ll be back in victory lane in no time.
The last driver I’ll touch on is Kasey Kahne. After a frustrating season to date, the driver of the No. 5 HMS Chevrolet finished eighth and gave Hendrick 40 percent of the top-10 finishers.
“We just battled,” Kahne said. “We got behind, got a lap down early again and we just had to fight back. The team did an awesome job to do that. We had great calls to get the car tightened up; I was so loose that I couldn’t go fast enough for a little while there. There at the end we were actually pretty competitive the last probably 250 laps, like really competitive. We were down a lap a lot of it, but we were really competitive. Once we got back up there I think we were definitely a top 10 car and we finished eighth. It was the best we have done in a long time. It feels nice.”
I’m not going to touch on what happened between Kahne and Greg Biffle right now because I’ll be doing a separate piece on that later today, but I will say he took full blame for what happened.
That about sums up the events in Texas. This week, NASCAR heads to our Tennessee mountain home of Bristol Motor Speedway for the Food City 500. This race is in my backyard being 90 minutes from Knoxville, so I’ll be on location this weekend bringing you all the happenings from Thunder Valley.
