Southern 500 turns early NASCAR Chase into a dogfight

Joey Logano called the Chase for the Championship format 10 weeks of hell, and Denny Hamlin learned immediately that his regular season title afforded him very little comfort in the pursuit of that elusive achievement.

On the other hand, the 16 stage points he earned over the first half of the Southern 500 somewhat offset contact from Michael McDowell that broke a right front toe link and a control arm in the right rear, leading to an 18th place finish.

He was only in this position due to a slow pit stop.

Combined with a Chrstopher Bell victory and stage win, Hamlin now leads his teammate by just 12 points with nine races remaining. Ryan Blaney is 16 points back and Tyler Reddick is 24 back.

The hellish dogfight is on.

“I mean it’s why they put stage points in the Cup Series a long time ago,” Hamlin said. “They wanted to reward the guys that had some issues maybe at the end. If you have nights like this, then you’re going to have to stack stage points up to kind of offset it a little bit, but that is certainly not the night we needed.”

What happened with McDowell anyway?

“He was struggling on the restart,” Hamlin said. “It looked like it was really tight. I went in there, slid him but I didn’t check up a lot. I did check-up some and I just didn’t catch a break there.”

With Hamlin relegated to finishing outside of the top-15, it set up a scenario where everyone chasing him could close the gap with good finishes, and that was certainly true for all the expected favorites.

Ty Gibbs finished second ahead of Tyler Reddick, Ryan Blaney, Kyle Larson and Chase Brisoce. As a result, they are all within a single race’s points of Hamlin headed towards World Wide Technology Raceway.

The Chase is on, one could say.

“I believe that the champion is going to be a Toyota,” said Bell after his win. “I said that all week at media day. We’ve got four great drivers (and) great teams. This is right there with 2019 when all of our teams were in it.

“All of us are still in contention for the title. I believe it will be one of us four or the 23XI cars. We just have a great product right now and our teams are hitting it. We need to make the most of it because we know it goes — we’re on top right now but we won’t be up there forever, that’s for sure.”

Which, this is what makes Briscoe only getting a sixth place after leading 30 laps so disheartening, because he was in a position to capitalize on it and ultimately didn’t.

“Yeah, what could have been,” Briscoe said. “We went back to dead last and got back to the lead within 100 laps, had a pretty good car. I just didn’t have it go my way there on that last restart. There was a couple of guys that stayed out on that restart and we chose the bottom, and my gut told me the bottom would be better – it would give me more options, and it just didn’t work out.”Ditto Reddick in third.”I think when we had that weather delay, we were definitely thinking we were going to have a long run coming up, and it ended up being shorter,” Reddick said. “We just lost some track position there. The guys made a good adjustment on the last stop, and we were able to work our way back forward. I was thinking it would go green out, and it never does here for whatever reason even though it looks like it is going to all day. Just fell behind at a bad time, but it was nice that we were able to claw our way back at the end there – just a little off.”Ryan Blaney entered the race as the second seed and 25 points and leaves third and 16 points after a fourth place finish and 11 stage points.That works.”It was a good call to take tires at the end,” Blaney said. “We had about four laps on them and, honestly, that restart wasn’t very good for me. I was really tight so I’m like, ‘We probably should take the opportunity to work on it and get tires.’ We were able to pick our way through there and have a good finish out of it.”When the night came we lost a little bit of handle. We just got tight and it just took forever to get it back turning when the track cooled off, but, overall, it was a good day with good stage points and a decent finish, so we’ll keep going.”

Mixed bag for Hendrick

Already facing a deficit at the start of the Chase, not to mention being winless throughout the season, William Byron suffered an engine failure of some kind and finished 37th.

He’s 16th in the standings now and 116 out of the lead. Short of winning half of the remaining races, that’s probably the end of a championship bid that barely existed in the first place.

Chase Elliott also had a chance at a top-10 but did not score any stage points and also suffered some of his own pit road woes when he misunderstood crew chief Alan Gustafson calling for a four tire stop and not two near the end of the race.

He finished 14th and fell to 72 points back.

But their teammate, Larson, looked capable of breaking a 49-race winless streak after leading a race high 99 laps and inherited the lead late by staying out on five lap old tires ahead of Bell and a group that came down pit road for four.

He was fourth at the time and it nearly worked. He aero blocked Bell as best as he could, losing the lead with 12 laps to go, and still held on to finish fifth. He’s only 49 points behind Hamlin after entering 60 points back.

“I thought more would stay out and give me a better shot,” Larson said. “Then I saw those guys lined up on the third row. I thought having an extra row or two would help me. I thought just jamming up the field for a couple laps would allow me to kind of take care of my tires for just a bit, knowing that they would catch me. I was surprised to actually hold them off as long as I did. I mean, it was a risk but worth it.”

Daniels wasn’t second guessing anything either.

“No, I mean, I think it actually gave us better opportunity than had we pitted,” Daniels said. “If we pit, we are probably going to get boxed in by (John Hunter Nemechek) in our pit stall, just with the way the pit selection went with the metric from Daytona and all that.

I would be really happy to do away with metric because it’s a system leftover from COVID, where the teams didn’t want the lineup every week when there was no practice or qualifying. We don’t need that anymore.

“To have a superspeedway’s results set the lineup and pit selection for the playoff race … yeah … We as a sport should be past that. I’ll get off my soap box now. But we were going to be boxed in our soap box more than likely. Pit fourth and come out sixth.”

So as Daniels sees it, this was a net positive outcome.

“To come out with the lead and put Yung Money on the front row, man, he did a great job. Historically, that has been a pretty high percentage move but that came with the other aero package, which made it easier to aero block, and that wasn’t the case with this package … and I’m not advocating for that kind of racing, but it was a higher percentage call.

“Maybe it rains and we’re leading and at worse, this call was a net wash or better than had we pitted.”

Ford performs

Team Penske, as a four car group when counting the Wood Brothers, all had top-5ish speed and all made the most of their days.

Blaney finished fourth and is very much a championship contender and Austin Cindric scored four stage points and finished 14th. He lost ground to Hamlin in the big picture but he had speed.

And then there’s Joey Logano, the three-time champion, who finished ninth despite an apparent failing engine.

“Big gains from where we were in the spring,” Logano said. “Things made a lot more sense in the car. We didn’t get stage points. That’s what you got to do in the Chase, you got to get stage points. We came up short on that.

“We fought a lot of issues. A plug wire came off, that was not good. Outside of that, I feel like we made some good gains. Team did a good job. Just came up a little bit short. We went for it there at the end. I’m with Paul on that, might as well go for it… we were ninth when we pitted and we finished ninth. Net neutral.”

While not in the playoffs, Josh Berry scored his sixth straight top-10 for Wood Brothers Racing, the first time this has happened for a driver of the iconic No. 21 since David Pearson in 1976.

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