NASCAR star Tony Stewart is retiring after this season, and this marks his final run at the Glen.
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Ignoring what he described as the worst pain he has ever felt in a race, Hamlin prevailed in a four-lap dash to the checkered flag Sunday to win the wreck-filled Sprint Cup race at newly paved Watkins Glen International. The victory was Hamlin’s first road course victory in his NASCAR Sprint Cup Career. At the same time, AJ Allmendinger, whose best chance of making the Chase evaporated when he sped on pit road early in the race, spun Kyle Larson while racing for fourth.
Road racing at Watkins Glen International is often recognized for many things, among them is the high intensity restarts, close contact through the corners and a wild final lap. Keselowski spun Truex in the turn and Hamlin’s No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota coasted to the victory. The track I thought drove very similar.
“We got some breaks, there, at the end”, Stewart said. The race also had two red flag stoppages for 30 minutes.
The biggest drama of the afternoon was whether there would be a postrace contretemps between Keselowski and Truex, who rammed and sideswiped Keselowki’s auto on the cool-down lap.
“It’s been great I got to visit with my family, come down and shake hands with some of the big shots, and also just hang out in the pits and watch them get in his auto and send them off for their race”, Eric Stratemeier said. 8 cautions and 2 red flags, one nearly 15 minutes long, for a series of crashes that started at lap 53 when Jimmie Johnson plowed into a already wrecked Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
As Hamlin quickly learned in the following years, winning a road course would prove much more hard than it seemed.
Martin Truex Jr. came closest, getting his Toyota to within a few feet of Hamlin’s similar vehicle entering the last turn of the last lap. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. lost control of his No. 17 Ford Fusion and slid across the track collecting multiple drivers. Jimmie Johnson slammed hard into Stenhouse, and Greg Biffle and Austin Dillon also were involved.
For the second year in a row, tickets to this event were completely sold out, to people near and far.
BUMP: Jeff Gordon bumped Dillon off the bus stop on Lap 3, crinkling the hood of the No. 88 Chevrolet. Gordon, a four-time victor at Watkins Glen, immediately slumped from 18th to 26th.
ROUGH STOP: Leader Carl Edwards, second place Busch and third-place Allmendinger pitted together on Lap 26 but Edwards (uncontrolled tire) and Allmendinger (speeding) were both penalized. Crew chief Greg Ives waited for a Lap 13 caution to fix the auto, intentionally pitting early, trading fix time for a penalty. He rallied from a penalty, while Ragan finished 33rd. The Sprint Cup series is off until the August 20 race at Bristol Motor Speedway.
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“It was just the front two cars, the 2 (Keselowski) and the 18 (Busch) just overshot the corner in that one restart and gave us an opportunity”, Hamlin said.
