After missing the first eleven races of the season, he caught fire in the summer to win four races in five weekends and quickly remind the racing world of his position as a contender, but in the time since, he has cooled down considerably.
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Dale Earnhardt Jr. won yesterday’s rain-shortened Quicken Loans Race for Heroes 500 at Phoenix worldwide Raceway as the field for the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship was set.
Four-time series champion Jeff Gordon is the only driver to advance to the title race based on a win in Round 3 and this is his final season as a fulltime NASCAR driver. As the only driver for Furniture Row Racing, he faces three drivers from much larger teams in Gordon (Hendrick Motorsports), Busch (Joe Gibbs Racing) and Harvick (Stewart-Haas Racing).
And it ended the championship hopes for drivers Carl Edwards, Brad Keselowski, Kurt Busch or Joey Logano and their teams. How would he have handled that final restart, in which he would have started fourth, if the race had continued?
“This is a great group to be a part of”, said Gordon, who is retiring after this season and whose four championships all came in NASCAR’s pre-Chase era.
The NASCAR premier series’ trophies arrived at Landmark Aviation at Miami global Airport on November 17, 2015.
Even though he was unable to recover from a round that started with a crash at Martinsville Speedway, Busch still considers this season a success, especially having missed the first three races of the season due to a NASCAR mandated suspension. While he gets a chance to defend his title at Homestead-Miami Speedway, he would have liked the opportunity to race for the victory at Phoenix, where he had been out front for 143 of 219 laps.
Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr., then, are the underdogs.
“We’ve just been in planning mode for trying to be in the Chase and planning mode for trying to make it to Homestead as a team”.
“We had an idea that the rain was in the area, but all the circumstances that played out at the end of the race are just kind of luck I think”, Earnhardt Jr. said.
“I’m excited about our chances and our opportunity”, Gordon said. He is Homestead’s all-time leader with a 7.5 average finish – 12 top-10 finishes in 14 starts.
This has been the best season of Martin Truex Jr.’s career and he doesn’t want it to end just yet. As he walked out of his indoor habitat at Zoo Miami, Koda touched Harvick’s auto first, signaling his prediction to win the championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Truex Jr.is the dark horse as the only single-car team in the title hunt. “With the way our stuff has been running here lately, I feel what we are taking there (to the final race of the season) might be a little bit better”.
“He’s got four championships, so I think he’s got the advantage”, said Harvick, who finished second.
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When Harvick did win Dover, and damaged his vehicle during the celebration, his competitors cried foul and said he did it on objective to prevent NASCAR from conducting a thorough post-race inspection. And like Junior a year ago, Logano’s not in the upcoming The Chase finale. Why? Reddick has two victories for Brad Keselowski Racing, and Crafton has a series-high five for ThorSport Racing. If I had 4 or 6 inches at Talladega, we would be going there to Homestead to race for a championship, too.
