A Strange Day as the Monster Attacks
The pundits all say that you only get one bad race in the chase if you want to have a chance to win. If that’s true, then most of the chaser used theirs up today. Talk about a strange race, this was definitely a strange one. Here’s how things went for some of them.
Matt Kenseth dominates the race, quickly putting several of his chase opponents a lap. Then with 12 laps left he blows up.
Harvick has a flat tire and goes 2 laps down.
Johnson has flat tire and goes several laps down.
Denny Hamlin pulls a bonehead move and takes out Kyle Petty and puts them both in the garage. Cuaght up in the mess was Clint Bowyer. An unhappy Kyle confronts Hamlin in the garage for what might have been some interesting fisticuffs had Denny got out of his car before Kyle walked away.
Kurt Busch had a tire go flat late causing a 12 car wreck that included Martin Truax Jr.
And Smoke? He started 28th, went a lap down early but Zippy and the guys worked on the car all day and he finished with a respectable 9th place finish. Afterwards he said, “Oh, gosh, I was on suicide watch for the first 200 laps, but we finally hit on something that the car liked. We also kept getting boxed in the pit box (by Paul Menard). We’d get in and then we’d lose positions on the track and then we’d have to fight our way through. Toward the end of the day there was a lot of chaos. Everybody was fighting for everything they could get and it’s like driving down a dark alley there late in the day especially when you go through Turn 2.”
Not all the chasers had a bad day. Jeff Burton ran 7th (the first car 1 lap down), Kyle Busch finished 5th and Carl Edwards picked up the win and moved into 3rd place in the standings. To finish off a bizarre day at the races, Edwards car failed the post race inspection and if NASCAR is consistant can expect to keep the win but be docked 25 points on Tuesday. That will drop him from 3rd to 8th in the standings.
A very strange day indeed.
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