The Sprint Cup Series playoffs, the Chase for the Championship, begins next week.
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With a win in hand, Chris Buescher only needed not to lose his 11-point lead on David Ragan for 30th in the Cup standings – the cutoff point for a race-winner to advance to the Chase.
Stewart, who is in the Chase and might need to look over his shoulder for Newman over the final 10 races, said he’s happy to accommodate Newman on his retirement comment.
Denny Hamlin won in a green-white-checker finish as the 16th caution flew with only four laps remaining.
Driving the FedEx Ground Toyota, Hamlin led 189 of the 407 laps and his margin of victory was.609 seconds. Hamlin pulled away on the restart for the final two laps of overtime that followed the last of a track-record 16 cautions.
It was yet another Denny Hamlin runaway for Joe Gibbs Racing on Saturday night in what turned out to be an anticlimactic end to NASCAR’s regular season.
It also marks the 24th consecutive race Hamlin will start inside the top 10.
Hamlin turned a fast last at 122.344 miles per hour in the third round of qualifying to claim his first pole position of the year. “You get to do it at home”.
“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”. Larson’s teammate, Jamie McMurray, was fourth, with Kurt Busch’s Stewart-Haas Racing Chevy rounding out the top five.
Going into Richmond, Jamie McMurray had a sizable 22-point cushion on Ryan Newman for the last spot into the Chase on points. 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 had a tire go down and just missed one accident – a very eventful day”.
“You just try to think of dotting every I and crossing every T because that’s what it’s all about, and you have to get everything out of every person that touches everything on that auto at another level to win this deal”.
Stewart had a different perspective.
He went off the radar after winning the Daytona 500 but is back running well at the right part of the season. “I got into him after that, but he had already chopped into me and messed up my line”. “We didn’t even give ourselves a shot at it, that is something I will have regret about”. It’s the third time by that time, there was once earlier in the race that no one saw.
Newman said he got into Stewart a little bit after Stewart cut him off and, according to Newman, intentionally drove across the nose of his vehicle. “He’ll get his wish”. We all know he’s got issues. The rest of the night it was a mix of one auto incidents that brought out yellow flags, however, a big crash at lap 363 took out seven cars, including Chris Buescher and Ryan Newman.
“There’s so many, I think, well prepared cars”. It’s just disappointing that you’ve got somebody old like that, that should be retired the way he drives. “A total team effort, just everyone at JGR building these fast, fast cars, can’t thank everyone enough”.
Elliott was just relieved to shed the stress of an eventful race. “Heading into the last restart, we had fresh tires and I was like, ‘There is nothing I can do about Kasey Kahne right now”. Hard for me not to say it’s 9 1/2 at this point.
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Dillon has been in championship battles before during his XFINITY and Truck Series days.
