“If I had four or six inches at Talladega, we would be going there to Homestead to race for a championship, too”. Today’s race is 312 laps at Phoenix worldwide Raceway.
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Race coverage on NBC (WKYC Ch. 3) begins at 2 p.m. and the green flag is scheduled to drop at 2:41. “I hope this has been fun for the tracks to be a part of, to have a friendly rivalry among one another”.
And then there’s Gordon, who has a chance to win a championship in his very last race. Same goes for Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards at Joe Gibbs Racing.
“This is a good roll for us, for sure”, said Johnson.
Earnhardt ended Harvick’s streak of four consecutive wins at Phoenix, but the champion was the class of the field. “But, hey, you lose a few and you win a few like that”. Under the right conditions Sunday, he could finish mid-pack and still move on. “But in the end it doesn’t matter how it looks on paper, it’s still a better position than we were at this point a year ago”. Harvick, Busch and Truex, who finished 14th, advanced on points.
In its own way, Truex’s journey to this point has been equally remarkable. Johnson, who was bounced from the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup in the first Challenger Round, edged Chase driver Kurt Busch (142.880 mph) for the top spot on the grid.
After a mediocre qualifying effort from both Penske drivers at Phoenix, Keselowski didn’t seem thrilled with the task at hand. A payback from Matt Kenseth knocked Logano out of a likely victory at Martinsville, and a tire failure at Texas served as another setback. “We did everything possible to put polish on a season like this and get out there with elbow grease and work hard it, and you know, when there’s a few tarnish that’s sitting there, polish and polish and polish, that’s all I kept doing all year”. “Obviously, strategy comes into play here a lot. We’ll see how that all shakes out, but I think Phoenix for us is one we’re all looking forward to”.
Keselowski ranks sixth in the Chase and Logano is eighth. As Harvick pulled away when the race returned to green, Earnhardt and Logano traded the second position back and forth. For Earnhardt, it was his third win of the season and his 26th career Sprint Cup victory.
So, detractors wonder, where is the line between gaming system and actually racing?
“When I think about what a few of the tracks have done – the towels with the fence on the 24th lap and a few of the different signage and things on the track – it’s been really overwhelming”, Gordon said.
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Johnson has five wins this season, but a mechanical failure in the first elimination race of the Chase bounced him from the playoffs. But he understood it and backs it now.
