Joey Logano is heading to the third round of the Chase thanks to his win in Sunday’s Sprint Cup race at Charlotte.
Logano dominated the race, leading a race-high 227 laps. Last week’s winner Kevin Harvick finished second.
The turning point of the race might have been – emphasize might, because who the hell knows. We’ll explain why in a moment – when Harvick had to briefly slow leaving pit road after his final stop because of teammate Danica Patrick. When he got back to full speed, Harvick was behind Logano. He never got close enough for the chance to pass.
And here’s where the explanation begins. Why was the pit road thing possibly such a big deal? Because passing was absolutely nonexistent at Charlotte on Sunday. The track was the site of the first real complaints about NASCAR’s 2015 rules package in May, and we saw again on Sunday why those complaints started.
Logano’s domination might be a question of chicken or egg. Sure, he had a good car, but with clean air at a track like Charlotte, a good car becomes a super-great car. Not only were cars unable to pass each other throughout the field because of the dirty air, a car in clean air might as well have been Superman.
There was no way of catching the leader if he jumped out to a multi-car length lead after a restart. If your Kia got a 2-second head start on the field Sunday you might have had a chance to win the race.
NASCAR made the right choice to stick with the 2015 rules for the Chase despite the abject failure it’s been through the first 80+ percent of the season. Sunday’s race wasn’t an indictment of that decision. It was simply an indictment of the rules themselves.
That wasn’t the only messup on display either. Track officials struggled mightily cleaning the track and it led to issues for Chase drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kyle Busch.
Justin Allgaier’s engine dropped fluid after he busted his radiator on a restart. NASCAR called a caution for the incident but failed to clean up the oil properly. When the race restarted, Earnhardt Jr.’s car skated into the wall. He had just gotten on the lead lap after fighting back from an earlier flat tire.
“And then they didn’t clean up the oil and we hit the wall again,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “Lot of oil up there. They put [absorbant] where they thought there was oil, but there was; I don’t know. I went around the speedy dry where they laid it on the track and man I flew into the fence. Ran into all kinds of fluid out there closer to the wall than where their speedy dry was. I couldn’t see it. Maybe the shadows were giving them a hard time in seeing it also so they could clean it up.”
Busch was in trouble as the field headed to pit road. He made a late decision to not pit and turned right to go back on the track. Problem is, he made that choice as Kyle Larson pulled the reverse. He faked not to pit and decided late to come to pit road. The two made contact and Busch, who had one of the better cars of the early part of the race, finished 20th.
The two drivers would never have been in that situation had NASCAR not cleaned up the track properly in the first place. After the sanctioning body denied there was oil on the track when the race went back green. Your guess is as good as anyone else’s as to what the fluid was that appeared on Earnhardt Jr.’s in-car camera when he skated into the wall.
“I don’t know,” Busch said when asked about what happened on pit road. “Just can’t say enough about my guys, all the work they put into these things. They don’t deserve to be put in these situations year in and year out but we are for some reason. But it’s tough and we’ll have to battle through with what we’ve got right now … Can’t pass anybody. Single-lane race track and then you put oil on the top lane to try to make anything happen and then you put yourself in the fence. So thanks to NASCAR for cleaning that up. But every single year, it keeps going the same way.”
Yes, that thank you was sarcastic.
NASCAR’s four-round Chase format leads to a lot of randomness. And especially so in the second round, which includes Talladega in two weeks, the most unpredictable of the Cup Series tracks. So it can be argued that a good finish for both Busch and Junior at Charlotte was imperative.
And they had them taken away by a failure on the part of NASCAR and the track. If neither driver makes it to the third round of the Chase, it’s fair to wonder how much blame goes to the sanctioning body.
Here’s how the 12 Chase drivers finished at Charlotte. Kansas is up next.
1. Joey Logano
2. Kevin Harvick
3. Martin Truex Jr.
4. Denny Hamlin
5. Kurt Busch
6. Carl Edwards
8. Jeff Gordon
9. Brad Keselowski
15. Ryan Newman
20. Kyle Busch
28. Dale Earnhardt Jr.
42. Matt Kenseth
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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!
