RELATED: Full race results | Updated series standings
Joey Logano surged to a dominant victory Sunday afternoon at Charlotte Motor Speedway, landing an automatic berth in the next round of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup playoffs.
Logano, driving the Team Penske No. 22 Ford, led 227 of 334 laps in the Bank of America 500, which was postponed by heavy Saturday night rain. He held off defending Sprint Cup champion Kevin Harvick to record his fourth win of the season, his first at the 1.5-mile track and 12th of his Sprint Cup Series career.
The victory gives Logano immunity from elimination in the three-race Contender Round, making him one of the final eight title-eligible drivers in the Eliminator Round. His road to last year’s championship round took a similar path; Logano also won 2014’s Contender Round opener, which was hosted last year at Kansas Speedway.
“This makes Talladega way easier,” Logano said, pointing toward the always dicey Contender Round finale at the 2.66-mile Alabama track. “I know that’s on everyone’s mind when this round starts and last year we won Kansas when it was the first race of this round and now we were able to get it this time at Charlotte. We’ll get lots of sleep here the next couple of weeks.”
Logano notched his victory a week after Harvick triumphed at Dover to claw his way back into the Chase.
“I think everyone saw how fast he was last week and it probably made a lot of people nervous, but our team kept their heads up and stayed confident,” Logano said. “We know we can beat them. We know we’ve got what we need over here, and our team is as tight-knit as they get.
“I’m proud of them. I couldn’t be more proud of them. We had a lot of money stops today to keep us out front. The pit stops were great and I couldn’t be more proud of what they’re doing right now.”
Harvick’s Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 Chevrolet finished .704 seconds behind Logano at the end of his 11th runner-up finish this year. Martin Truex Jr., Denny Hamlin, Kurt Busch and Carl Edwards completed the top six as Chase drivers swept the first half-dozen positions. Seventh-finishing Austin Dillon was the top non-Chase driver.
Early trouble made for a difficult day for Chase drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr., Matt Kenseth and Kyle Busch, all of whom failed to finish on the lead lap. Earnhardt spent much of the race’s middle section one lap down after brushing the wall twice, on Lap 69 and 74. He continued after repairs, then scraped the wall again after hitting oil on the track on a Lap 190 restart.
Kenseth, the Coors Light Pole Award winner in Thursday qualifying, led 72 laps early before running into his own pitfalls. A pair of errors on pit stops pushed him back in the running order, then things got worse when he made contact with fellow Chaser Ryan Newman on Lap 176, sending his Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 entry into the outside wall. After numerous stops for repairs, Kenseth scraped the wall again on Lap 204 and then hammered it on Lap 241, sending him behind the wall.
“These are never the kind of days you want to have for sure, but it’s just one of those days,” Kenseth said. “We’re real fast up front and we’re real tight in traffic. We got behind on that first pit deal and then didn’t catch the cautions right and it went green, overshot my pit and put us in the back so it’s just like one thing led to another and led to another.
“We shouldn’t have ever been back there to start with. My mistakes and they cost us today so we’ll just move on from this and get ready for Kansas.”
Busch, Kenseth’s JGR teammate, suffered damage and lost headway when he collided with Kyle Larson in a quirky collision at the pit-road entrance. Both drivers made moves to fake and entry onto pit road, but when Busch tried to return to the track in third place, he made sizable contact with second-place Larson.
Busch wound up with a 20th-place finish, Earnhardt 28th and Kenseth 42nd, leaving all three with plenty of ground to make up in the next two Contender Round races — next weekend at Kansas Speedway and the following week at Talladega Superspeedway.
RELATED: Where Chase bubble drivers stand after Charlotte
The race was originally scheduled for Saturday night, but rain forced its postponement to a sunny Sunday.
“Well, we definitely had to make some bigger swings at the handling of the car than what we were prepared for last night,” said Harvick. “I like racing in the day, and especially here at Charlotte, because it seems like the cars move around more and it’s harder to get a hold of your car.
“But we never were able to get the balance right on our car all weekend and just never really got comfortable in the car — but kept grinding away, and it got better throughout the day today, and that’s a good thing on race day.”
Contributing: NASCAR Wire Service