(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)
By Aaron Bearden
Post-race review and analysis from the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at ISM Raceway.
*Writer not present at the track this week. Observations are from afar.
Who Won?
Kyle Busch. The 2015 Cup Series champion capped off a dominant day by reeling in and passing Ryan Blaney in the final run to claim his second-straight Phoenix win.
Who Claimed the Stages?
Blaney and Busch.
Top Stories
Dirty Air
Numerous drivers attempted pit strategy calls during Sunday’s 312-lap race. There were two-tire stops, no-tire stops, and a few drivers even stayed out during various caution periods.
Who could blame them? It was so difficult to pass that most gambles seemed like safe bets.
“It was really, really, really, really, really hard to pass,” Joey Logano said afterward. “You start to catch a car and you just stop. That big spoiler on the back just makes it really, really challenging to even get to the car in front of you to make something happen, so restarts became everything.”
Joe Gibbs Racing brought a fleet of fast machines, and in the end the team’s trio of drivers that avoided issues – Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr. and Denny Hamlin – drove through the field on the final lengthy run to the checkered flag to claim top-five finishes.
The group showed that passing can be done, but even they acknowledged the difficulty of completing overtakes afterward.
“You just can’t drive through the field,” Hamlin said afterward. “You have to be patient and wait on everyone to kind of mess up or you’ve got try to run a different line, but when you do it’s just too much distance.”
While NASCAR brought the 750hp package to ISM Raceway, the large rear spoiler and higher downforce levels led to difficulties passing in dirty air. Drivers often found themselves trapped in position, searching for different lines to find a way around the next competitor.
Difficulty passing at Phoenix was nothing new. But this year’s race was different than the past – more challenging.
“It’s always really tough to pass at Phoenix,” fourth-place finisher Aric Almirola said. “But then when you put more downforce in the cars we’re going across the middle of the corner faster and cars are punching a bigger hole in the air with a bigger spoiler, it just inherently makes the cars a lot harder to drive when you’re behind and in traffic.”
There were numerous overtakes in the mid-pack. But as drivers made their way to the front of the field, and clean air became more prevalent, finding ways around the frontrunners proved exceedingly difficult. Drivers like Austin Dillon, Ryan Newman and Clint Bowyer were able to hold positions inside of the top-10 throughout the day when pit strategy gave them track position, but the moment they were mired in the pack the group proved unable to work their way back into contention.
Even Kevin Harvick — Phoenix’s most dominant active driver, with nine Cup wins at the track — pitted for four tires on the final round of pit stops only to stall out in ninth during his march through the field.
“It took us I don’t even know how long to get past cars that were six, seven, eight-tenths slower than us at the end of the race, so just extremely difficult to pass,” he said. “We got shuffled there on the restarts and just decided to come down and get tires and see if we could do something better than being in the middle on two tires, and it took us a long time to get back going.”
The challenging conditions made for interesting strategy plays and intense restarts. The field frequently jumped three, four and occasionally even five-wide in the opening laps after taking the green flag, knowing that it marked their best opportunity to pass. Kyle Larson took advantage of numerous mid-race restarts to rise from 31st to sixth at race’s end.
“You had to take advantage of the restarts for sure,” Larson said. “I felt like I did a good job of that today going to the very top when I was in the outside lane and passing four or five guys at times.”
But outside of restarts, many drivers found themselves trapped in position, needing the help of lapped traffic to overcome the drivers ahead of them. Even race winner Kyle Busch acknowledged that without the heavy lapped traffic at race’s end he he likely would have lost out to Blaney – who was running on older tires.
“If it’s a 10-lap run, it’s his. 20, 30, 40, 50 laps probably his race,” Busch said. “If it was a long enough run…
“Even some of those stragglers that were a lap car here, a lap car there, he could get through them fast enough that I couldn’t do anything with him. Once it got to the train of about five of them that Brad was in, I don’t even remember who else was in, Hemric was in, that’s when it became tough.”
Assuming passing continues to prove difficult, the fall’s return to Phoenix promises to be a race keyed around track position and strategies to gain it for the remaining playoff contenders.
Harvick said only one thing when asked what he’d learned for the fall race: “Just restart first.”
One Win Away
Kyle Busch has spent most of the past two decades racking up race victories and climbing up NASCAR’s all-time wins list.
In fact, Busch has so many trophies that he’s had trouble finding a place for all of them. Between his personal wins and the triumphs of Kyle Busch Motorsports drivers, Busch has had to build a place to store the spoils of his success.
“It’s a 77,000 square foot building in Mooresville, North Carolina, that houses Kyle Busch Motorsports and houses 199, plus all of the KBM driver trophies and stuff like that,” Busch said. “We have gotten our fair share of trophy cases we’ve gone through. Every time we build a new one, we fill it up. It’s a good problem to have.”
Much to the chagrin of his many detractors in the NASCAR fan base, Busch is a lone win away from reaching a rare milestone in the sport – becoming the second driver with 200 wins in NASCAR national series competition.
It’s a major accomplishment, and one that’s drawn Busch comparisons to NASCAR legend Richard Petty’s 200 victories in what was the early stages of the sport’s premier series.
Some say Busch’s accomplishment is more impressive given the competition of the modern day, while others downplay the accomplishment given that 147 of the 199 triumphs have come in the Xfinity Series and Gander Outdoors Truck Series.
As for Busch? He tries not to give the debate much thought either way.
“It’s not for me to worry about,” Busch said. “It’s for everybody else to discuss and talk about and argue over and debate.”
Four wins in the span of 10 days placed the Nevadan on the precipice of the landmark total leaving Phoenix. Were it not for a speeding penalty in Las Vegas, he could earned a double weekend sweep and already had win No. 200 on Sunday at ISM Raceway. He was quick to acknowledge that after winning Sunday’s Cup Series race.
“Man, God, this makes last week feel so much stupider,” Busch said. “I wish we could have swept last week, too. That would have been pretty awesome to start out this year with two weekend sweeps, three being in my hometown of Vegas.”
Busch has become an easy one to hate given his prowess for winning in the sport’s minor tours. The Nevadan tops the all-time win list in each of them, with a staggering 94 Xfinity Series wins, and 53 triumphs in the Truck Series. But hidden behind those victories is an impressive Cup Series total.
At just 33 years old, Busch has tallied 52 Cup Series wins – a total that places his ahead of drivers like Junior Johnson, Tony Stewart and Ned Jarrett on the all-time wins list. Busch sits within 30 victories of legends Rusty Wallace (55) and Dale Earnhardt (76), and with upwards of a decade of possible racing remaining, the veteran could still reach as many as 100 Cup wins or more if he can continue to win with the consistency shown in recent years.
He knows it won’t be an easy feat to accomplish, but 100 Cup wins is a mark Busch would like to reach before he wraps up his NASCAR career.
“Let’s set it at a hundred and see if we can’t get there,” Busch said. “That would certainly put us up there with the top guys, being one of the best of the best. But overall that’s a long ways to go. You got to win a lot of races, a lot of years, to be able to tally up that many.
“I’m not quite as good as Jeff Gordon any more with being able to win 10 races a year or 13 races a year. I don’t know if those details will happen that much any more. Last year we gave it a shot with eight. See if we can’t keep firing them off like we are right now and living the dream, baby.”
Other Notes
- Jimmie Johnson has four wins and 15 top-fives at ISM Raceway. But times have been so difficult for the No. 48 team in recent years that the veteran was overjoyed with an eighth-place run on Sunday. “Definitely a strong performance,” Johnson said. “We need more. We need to find more, but on a short track where grip is so important our guys did a nice job all weekend long of bringing a little bit more. Excited about that. We weathered the storm on two tires, on four and ended up with a nice top 10.”
- Ryan Blaney fell short of giving Roger Penske a third-consecutive win and placing all three Team Penske drivers in the postseason on Sunday. But given his poor luck in recent weeks, Blaney was happy to bring home a third-place result. “It’s the kind of day we needed,” he said. “We’ve been poised to have days like this, contend for wins and run top five it just hasn’t happened this year. We haven’t gotten the finishes we deserved and this is more like it, so that was good.”
- For the second time in three races, Richard Childress Racing was poised to have a top-five finisher only to lose the run to late issues. Daniel Hemric was the first to suffer a letdown, blowing a tire late in the running at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Austin Dillon was in position to potentially score a fifth-place finish on Sunday when he ran out of fuel, dropping to 21st. Dillon was at least willing to poke fun at the run afterward, though.
- Martin Truex Jr. and the remnants of Furniture Row Racing have picked up where they left off with Joe Gibbs Racing. Truex has two second-place finishes in his first four starts with the team – an impressive result when you consider that he’d finished no better than fourth at this point last year.
- Chip Ganassi Racing continues to be Chevrolet’s top team as the bowtie brand struggles with overall speed. The team placed both Kyle Larson and Kurt Busch inside of the top-10 on Sunday, giving the pair a combined five top-10s in four races.
- Front Row Motorsports rookie Matt Tifft showed early signs of progress at ISM Raceway, finishing just one lap down despite a pair of lengthy green-flag runs and scored his first top-20 result in 20th.
