Four Chase races in the books, four different winners and who knows what excitement, absurdity, chicanery, etc., will unfold when the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series moves to Kansas Speedway this weekend.
Another 1.5-mile track, and one of the few located next to a casino. It’s not the first, but it is the newest in that regard.
Denny Hamlin didn’t stomp the field at Chicagoland Speedway, home of the opening race in this year’s Chase for the Sprint Cup. In fact, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver led only nine laps. But he raced with a torn ACL, and any injury that includes the word “torn” tells you all you want to know.
Hamlin also found himself at the back of the field almost before the green flag had quit waving when his No. 11 Toyota spun barely two laps into the race.
But he won, the Chase was on and the series moved to New Hampshire Motor Speedway, where defending series champion Kevin Harvick ran out of gas after nearly whipping the field into submission.
Matt Kenseth, the last driver to win NASCAR’s premier series title that didn’t have a “Chase” stamped all over it, is a teammate of Hamlin. He had full use of both ACLs and more fuel in his tank and all of a sudden JGR had two of its four drivers guaranteed to move on to the next round.
At Dover, the least likely person to have an issue that might prevent him from advancing to the next round had just that. A torn (there’s that word again) rear axle seal doomed Jimmie Johnson, the 10-time Dover winner, and all of a sudden this year’s Chase had a very different look to it.
Fans have long complained that the grouping of Chase tracks favored Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 team. Given his series-leading 25 “playoff” victories, it’s an easy assumption to make. But perhaps this new elimination format does not.
Johnson’s mechanical issues set the course for his eventual demise, but likely didn’t alter the outcome of the Dover race. Harvick, his tank full of fuel, ripped through the field so impressively that folks began dissecting his winning burnout in hopes of finding clues for his performance.
That’s when you know you’ve got ’em whipped.
A field of 12 advanced to open the Contender Round last week at Charlotte, where it rained hard enough and long enough to force officials to delay the race by a day.
Joey Logano, never a winner at Charlotte but finding Victory Lane on a regular basis since moving over to Team Penske, did the destruction this time, leading 227 of 334 laps.
Four Chase races, each with its own set of oddities, and four different winners. Almost before the checkered flag has unfurled, each winner has been described as “the team to beat.”
Logano, the winner of last year’s Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas, said his team pays no mind to what others are doing or how they are performing.
“You’ve got to look at yourself,” the 25-year-old said. “We just stay focused on doing what we know how to do. Don’t go and reinvent the wheel and stay focused.
“There are going to be cars that are dominant each week, and we’ve just got to be that car more times than not.”
Logano’s No. 22 team hasn’t been the most dominant, but it has been the most recent to show what it is capable of.
Next comes Kansas and yet another opportunity. The Chase hasn’t seen five different winners in the opening five races since 2010.
Given the way this year’s events have played out, five for five isn’t only possible, it’s also entirely likely.