Those four drivers – Chase Elliott, Austin Dillon, Jamie McMurray and Chris Buescher – left RIR with official Chase berths.
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ELLIOTT: The rookie driver for Rick Hendrick needs to finish at least 19th to make the Chase with no help if there is a new victor at Richmond.
Elliott brought out the third caution of the night after contact with the Turn 1 wall, but he recovered to finish 19th to earn his Chase spot with room to spare.
Buescher made a green-flag pit stop on lap 308 of 407 due to a deflating tire. (And bear in mind that, in each case, a driver can finish one position lower with a lap led and two positions lower with most laps led).
Closing out the regular 26-race season, the 400-miler, which had a track-record 16 cautions, was quick to swallow up its first victim. But the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Camry fell short, finishing third behind victor Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson.
It was a wild night in Richmond to say the least before Denny Hamlin was finally able to outrun the field on a final restart in overtime to lock down his third win of the season.
Racing about 20 miles from where he grew up in Chesterfield, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver turned a fast lap at 122.344 mph in the third round of qualifying to claim his first pole of the year. You have to get good finishes over the next 10 weeks in order to advance.
“I see all the extra Denny Hamlin shirts and hats and everything, and it fires me up every time I’m here”, he said in victory lane. “Trying to figure out the ideal scenarios so that we can race into the Chase and then move through the Chase”.
Chase Elliott, Austin Dillon and Jamie McMurray held on to their slots, holding off challengers Newman and Kasey Kahne. So Buescher, last year’s Xfinity Series champion, needs a plan on how to race the regular-season finale.
With the exception of Kahne, all top-10 finishers on Saturday will compete in the Chase.
The fireworks came off the track at Richmond International Raceway, where Tony Stewart intentionally wrecked Ryan Newman before Newman angrily chided his former boss for the accident that officially ended Newman’s chances to make the playoffs.
For his part, Stewart stepped up and admitted he wrecked Newman on objective.
“The No. 14 (Stewart) cut across my nose into Turn 1, and I got into him after that, but he’d already chopped into me and messed up my line, and I clipped him a little bit coming off of (Turn) 2”, Newman said of Stewart, who was racing at Richmond for the last time in a Sprint Cup auto. It’s just ridiculous. I only hit him in Turn 1 when he cut across my nose. “We’ll keep fighting like we always do”. We look at this first round, and we want to make it past that round. Just disappointing that you’ve got somebody old like that that retired (should be retired) the way he drives.
Not surprisingly, Stewart had a different perspective.
“We’ve got a really good vehicle, and that’s going to make it easier”, he added. Once we get through that, I’ll worry about Week 2. I don’t do that to him.
“Early in the race (Newman) ran into me and cut down across my nose”, Stewart said.
Stewart did admit that Newman was correct in his assessment that he tried to chop him off on objective. The contact piled up eight cars, including Dylan Lupton, who got wedged on top of Newman’s No. 31. “He’ll get his wish”. He’s a guy that can get in here, and he’s going to win a championship before it’s all said and done. “I don’t believe in 10, so 9, 9 1/2 would be optimum. So I think it’s really hard to figure out what’s going to happen”. It wasn’t anything like winning a race but it is just as big in a difference sense.
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“I don’t think anybody has got a leg up on us, for sure”. “A lot of the guys that we were challenging only had one lap per session, but my auto didn’t really come in that quick, so I had to run multiple laps”. Newman’s team was penalized 15 points this week by NASCAR for failing post-race inspection at Darlington, and the punishment made his task of trying to race his way into the Chase extremely hard.
