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CONCORD, N.C. — One point.
One point separated Ty Dillon from Darrell Wallace Jr. in the Chase Grid after Sunday’s elimination race at Charlotte Motor Speedway that dwindled the field of 12 to eight drivers.
And with one point, Dillon’s 2016 championship run came to a sorrowful end.
“Man, it’s heartbreaking,” an emotional Dillon said after the race. “We’re a team that should have been in the final round and you’ve got to expect things to happen, which happened in the first race at Kentucky. That’s the way this Chase is built. Things happen, some of the best cars are going to get knocked out. But you’ve got to be able to rebound if you’re going to win a championship and we weren’t able to rebound good enough.”
The Chase bubble fluctuated throughout the 300-mile event, as initial problems for Wallace & Co. set the No. 6 back in the field and on the Chase Grid. But Dillon’s crash that resulted in a 27th-place finish in the opening Chase race at Kentucky Speedway two weeks ago put the No. 3 camp in an upward battle that needed an especially strong run at Charlotte.
And despite posting a runner-up result last week at Dover, Dillon’s 11th-place finish Sunday didn’t cut it, as he struggled to pass 10th-place Ryan Sieg on older tires for that one point he needed to advance.
“We had so much momentum coming off Dover,” Dillon said. “Had a car capable of winning a race and today we couldn’t even stay on the lead lap, so it’s just very upsetting.
“… I’ve wanted this championship so bad every year I’ve ran the XFINITY Series. Just, it hurts.”
As the checkered flag waved as the sun set in North Carolina, Wallace Jr. was on the other side of the Chase bubble, his No. 6 Roush Fenway Racing Ford advancing with a 20th-place result. But after battling a torn-up nose, pit road penalty and free-handling race car in the day time, Wallace was less than thrilled about his performance.
“We don’t deserve to be in the Chase,” Wallace said on pit road after the race. “Just bummed we couldn’t have a better showing for Leidos, especially at our home track. … When we race during the day, no matter what track we go to, we are all over the place. But here when nightfall came about, they were telling me to be conservative, but I felt like I could have drove up there to the lead, how much different the car was and how much better it drove.
“We’re missing something … I don’t know what … we’ve got going on for daytime stuff, but it’s just a bummer — yeah, cool we made it to the next round. But who the hell is happy about the way we ran?”
Despite the messy run, Wallace expressed gratitude for his advancement to the next round, a chance to improve upon the team’s daytime racing program.
“My team never gave up and I never gave up,” Wallace said. “Never got too pissed off, too frustrated, never put her in the fence. (Ran) up there in the top, I was trying to get it all I could to keep us going … We’ve just got to get better. I don’t like running 20th.”
Wallace will move on to Kansas next week to vie for the XFINITY Series championship, along with Elliott Sadler, Daniel Suarez, Erik Jones, Justin Allgaier, Blake Koch, Brendan Gaughan and Ryan Reed.
Brennan Poole — who was forced to change the battery midway through the race in his No. 48 Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates Chevrolet — Brandon Jones, Sieg and Dillon were the four drivers eliminated in the opening round of the inaugural XFINITY Series Chase.
For No. 3 crew chief Nick Harrison, these final four races are about redemption, finishing a disappointing Chase on a high note.
“Just one of those deals — you’ve just got to hold your head up and move on to the next race,” Harrison told NASCAR.com in the garage. “It’s racing and (you’ve) gotta be a big boy — we weren’t good enough to advance, we had ourselves in a hole at Kentucky. Just didn’t make it.
“… The only way to have a little satisfaction of a season is to go out there and win some of these races and that’s definitely what we’re going to do — there will be no give-up here.”