RELATED: Kasey Kahne wins at Indianapolis | Race results | Detailed breakdown
SPEEDWAY, Ind. — The leaders crashed, it rained, there were three red-flag periods and who could have guessed the final NASCAR appearance in July at Indianapolis Motor Speedway would turn out to be a night race?
In the 24-year history of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series at IMS, there have been some memorable races and some strange occurrences.
Perhaps never so many in one race, though.
Kasey Kahne won Sunday’s Brantley Gilbert Big Machine Brickyard 400 to snap a losing streak that stretched all the way back to Atlanta of ’14. It had been awhile for the Hendrick Motorsports driver, 102 races to be exact, but Kahne still managed to not get lost on the way to Victory Lane. There was a side trip to the infield care center for fluids, but that’s another story.
The last nine races for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series have seen nine different winners, and you can say that’s a product of stage racing, a more competitive field or global warming. But it’s impressive nonetheless.
How big of a win was it for Kahne?
“Puts him in the Playoffs,” team owner Rick Hendrick said matter-of-factly.
And boots someone else out as well. In this case Clint Bowyer, who is 11th in points but lowest among those in the top 16 without a win. Joey Logano is 13th in points but has an encumbered win, meaning he can’t use it to guarantee his No. 22 team a spot in the 10-race playoffs.
Kahne and Austin Dillon are 20th and 21st, respectively, and — because they each have one win — all but guaranteed a spot in the playoffs.
MORE: Playoff picture after Indianapolis
– There have been occasions when the first- and second-place cars have crashed and knocked each other out of the race but it’s rare. It happened Sunday though, between Martin Truex Jr. and Kyle Busch and it may or may not have been the result of a discontinued race strategy that had seen the two Toyota drivers working together earlier on restarts.
Truex has three wins this year and is the points leader; Busch is fourth in points and seemingly safe but still winless.
– Multiple cautions extended the race seven laps beyond its originally scheduled distance, including one that brought out the third red flag of the day and disrupted action for nearly 25 minutes. At 167 laps, Sunday’s race was the second longest, distance-wise, of the 24 contested. Last year’s 400 went a total of 10 laps beyond its scheduled distance.
The cautions turned what looked as if it would become a fuel mileage race into a fight for survival. And gave Kahne and Brad Keselowski multiple opportunities to spin or win.
In the end, it was trouble for others, namely Denny Hamlin and Paul Menard and Ty Dillon, that ended the all-day affair just before sundown.
There had been an eight-car incident on the front stretch only moments earlier and a single-car crash – a three-wide move by Jimmie Johnson that went awry. And those all occurred after the race went into overtime.
RACE REWIND: Wild one at Indianapolis
What did the drivers think?
“I think it was just a crazy race,” noted Ryan Newman, the winner here in 2013 under much tamer conditions. “I think what we saw today was some crazy strategy, some crazy restarts.”
The racing itself, the third-place finisher said, really wasn’t that bad.
“I’ve seen worse racing here by far, as far as not being able to pass,” Newman said. “I didn’t think it was ideal, but it was definitely crazy.”
That it wasn’t the norm, Keselowski said, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Because I don’t think the norm is what we all were looking for,” the runner-up said.
“I still think there’s a lot of work we can do to make a race that has a good balance between high attrition and also having key moments that we all love to see. And this race had, you know, some key moments that I think we’ll probably play back for the next five or 10 years.
“But then it also had a lot of attrition and a lot of moments that did kind of look a little off key.”
A schedule change will see the Brickyard race conclude the regular season next year as the date moves from July to early September. The weather likely will be more cooperative. Whether the competitors will follow suit remains to be seen.