HAMPTON, Ga. — In the swirl of the crazy final laps of Sunday’s Autotrader 400, Chase Briscoe was in the middle of things but lacking enough to be at the front of them.
On a day/night during which every sort of racing move — wise/not so wise, sneaky/blatant, breathtaking/wall-banging — was made, Briscoe followed Tyler Reddick across the line to finish second, one of the two top survivors of one of the best races in recent EchoPark Speedway history.
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The overtime race followed a previous Sunday of chaos and drama at Daytona and was the last of three weekend races that created great theater and rattled the walls at EchoPark.
Crazier than normal for two weeks in a row? “Nah, it’s Daytona and Atlanta,” Briscoe said. “That’s just the product of the beast. No surprise at all.”
Others might have admitted to a little surprise. Bubba Wallace, who appeared on target for a win much of the race and was dropped to eighth in the frantic finish. Christopher Bell, who was knocked off the front row by Carson Hocevar and into the wall after a late restart. Joey Logano, whose wiggle in the middle of the track, wounded his chances — and Denny Hamlin’s.
In the end, Briscoe couldn’t get close enough to Reddick over the closing mile to even think about taking a shot at the leader. “I just didn’t have the straightaway speed or the ability to get there,” Briscoe said. “I had to be really, really calculated with what I did. Even then, I just never had that extra little bit to do something with it.”
The fact that there wasn’t a fender-crunching meeting between first and second place in the shadow of the checkered flag was one of the most unusual moments of the 400-plus miles. It was a relatively sedate run to the finish compared to most of the rest of the race, which was contested on a brutally cold and windy day.
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Action during the day matched the tight and unpredictable racing presented in Saturday’s Craftsman Truck and O’Reilly Auto Parts series races. EchoPark continues to provide proof that the 2021 reconfiguration of the racing surface was a smart move. Although the Atlanta-area track is grouped with Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway as “drafting tracks,” EchoPark stands apart as a hybrid sort of speedway where passing, for those who enjoy the risk, can be accomplished by a single powerful car instead of a chain of cars drafting.
Some of that kind of passing worked Sunday, and some of it didn’t, with big results. After the race, winning car owner Hamlin, one of the crash victims, called it “carnage city.” For two weeks in a row, if you weren’t involved in a wreck, you were in the tiny minority. At Daytona, 37 of 41 cars were in accidents. At EchoPark, the number was 29 of 38.
“Felt like you have to be really confident here, and you’ve got to be willing to kind of video-game it a little bit,” Hocevar said. “I mean, what we’re doing isn’t fathomable to believe what we’re doing probably five, 10 years ago. Like, this is very different. So yeah, just reminds me of a video game, and I obviously play a bunch of those. I felt like confidence is just really, really big here. A lot of offense, and it worked out for us today.”
The movement in the big pack of front-running cars resulted in a track-record 57 lead changes. Counting Daytona, there have been 122 lead changes, a record through the first two races in any NASCAR season.
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On Sunday, the difference between a successful pass and one leading to sliding, spinning race cars generally was the alignment front-to-back of the two competing cars. If Driver A was attempting to set up a pass or push Driver B in the draft, a mismatch of bumpers typically led to predictable chaos that led to other drivers being pulled into the trouble.
At Daytona, the big drafting groups looked much like waves of cars rolling down an interstate, and, despite the high speeds, drivers can find a certain comfort level in the sameness of those packs lap after lap. On Sunday at EchoPark, there was enough movement and dancing within groups of cars to believe that anybody could mount a run to the front at any time.
When those runs didn’t work or when somebody wasn’t paying the right amount of attention, fenders met and cautions flew. But when a single car suddenly popped out of line and made a measured but daring pass with inches to spare, there emerged the kind of racing fans might expect at the tour’s bigger, faster tracks.
At the end of Sunday, winner Reddick had a hurting car, as did team owner Hamlin. Now they race on to Circuit of The Americas (Sun., 3:30 p.m. ET, FOX, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), looking to extend a season that has been, unpredictably enough, magical.