Chase Watch: Keselowski finishes 31st while Harvick is 33rd
Is Brad Keselowski already in the same situation he faced in the second round of the Chase?
Last week at Talladega, Keselowski needed to win to advance to the third round. He did just that and may need another win in the next two races to advance to the season finale at Homestead.
Sunday at Martinsville, Keselowski was en route to a potential top ten when his car suffered a rear-gear problem. It started shaking as he was in the corner and simply slowed as he accelerated off the corner.
He ended up being a giant roadblock. As his car was not nearly going as fast as it should be, other cars started crashing behind him. Danica Patrick was involved. So were Kasey Kahne and Casey Mears. Martin Truex Jr. too.
The melee caused a red flag and Keselowski had to take his car back to the garage for repairs.
His team fixed the car and got it back out on track, but not before he was many laps down. Keselowski ended up 31st, two spots ahead of Kevin Harvick.
Earlier in the race, Harvick was spun by Matt Kenseth, whose car wheel hopped as it got into the corner. He smacked the wall hard and also had to go behind the wall to fix the damage.
Both drivers now face a serious points deficit. Four of the remaining eight drivers in the Chase advance to Homestead and Keselowski is already 26 points behind fourth place. Harvick is 28. Can the two make up what’s essentially more than 25 spots on the track in the next two races? Possibly. But the better strategy is to go win at Texas, where Keselowski’s teammate Joey Logano won in April, or Phoenix, where Harvick won at in February.
Here’s how all eight of the Chase drivers did at Martinsville:
1. Jeff Gordon (+5 on fourth): Gordon finished second and couldn’t run down Dale Earnhardt Jr. at the end. If you’re a Gordon fan, you probably would have liked a Formula 1-style set of team orders on the last restart to have Junior move over for Gordon. But that wasn’t going to happen. Instead of being the race winner and the points leader, Gordon is simply the points leader.
2. Ryan Newman (+2): Newman is the cross between the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare and the Energizer Bunny. He keeps going and going and going and going, just not at the pace of the fastest cars on a given weekend. But hey, Martinsville was Newman’s fourth top-five finish of the season and his third-place finish tied for his highest finish of the year.
3. Joey Logano (+1): Logano, once again, had a fast car and led laps. He finished fifth and is in a good position heading to the place where he got his first win of the season. After winning at Richmond in the spring, he finished sixth in the fall. Another sixth or better next week should put him in a mighty fine spot for advancement at Phoenix.
4. Matt Kenseth (+28 on eighth): Kenseth now holds the final transfer spot. Harvick fans are going to be wishing for some karma to come back and get Kenseth after the wheel hopping, but it was clearly unintentional. He finished sixth.
5. Denny Hamlin (-2 to fourth): Hamlin restarted sixth on the last restart but was stuck in the outside line. That meant that he didn’t have the preferred groove and he fell back to eighth at the end.
6. Carl Edwards (-20): While Keselowski and Harvick had worse finishes, Edwards had the worst overall run of the day. He simply wasn’t fast from the drop of the green flag and spent much of the latter half of the race a lap down. He was 20th.
7. Keselowski (-26)
8. Harvick (-28)
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
