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Entering the Contender Round of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, something looms over the remaining 12 drivers in the sport’s championship battle — massive Talladega Superspeedway.
Yes, the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series is at Charlotte Motor Speedway for Saturday’s Bank of America 500 (7 p.m. ET, NBC, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) and from there the series moves to Kansas Speedway for the Hollywood Casino 400. Yet the 2.66-mile track, which hosts the CampingWorld.com 500 on Oct. 25, is firmly on the minds of all the competitors even though it’s two weeks away.
“I think this round is probably the most stressful because of Talladega,” Martin Truex Jr. told reporters earlier this week at Contender Round Media Day at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. “I think everybody is really putting a lot of pressure on themselves to do good in these first two and try to get a win so you don’t have to worry about Talladega.”
And Truex is not the only driver who feels that way.
“Yeah, nobody wants to go to Talladega ‑‑ even if you’re Dale Earnhardt Jr. and you feel like you’re the most dominant car on those restrictor-plate tracks, and we’ve been, I think, as dominant as he has been just without the victories, I still don’t want to go there and have to be in the top 10,” four-time series champion Jeff Gordon said during media day. “You know, it’s just one of those tracks where there’s too many variables that can reach out and grab you.”
Carl Edwards simplified the approach even more, saying that he looked at the Contender Round as a “two-race series” instead of three races because of the uncertainty with Talladega. The two-time 2015 winner predicted drivers would be going even harder to try to get a win at Charlotte or Kansas to secure a spot in the Eliminator Round of eight drivers.
“If you have a shot, if you can see the win at one of these next two races, you are going to see just some really tough racing for that win because nobody wants to go to Talladega with the uncertainty,” Edwards said on Thursday at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “There’s going to be a lot of nerves at Talladega.”
Last year Kansas hosted the opening race of the Contender Round. That event saw Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. find trouble they ultimately could not recover from, while Brad Keselowski had to score a walk-off win at ‘Dega to overcome his Kansas trouble.
But simply navigating the opening two races of the Contender Round doesn’t make drivers immune to Talladega trouble, either. Kyle Busch scored top-five finishes at Kansas and Charlotte in 2014 before being caught up in a 10-car wreck at the Alabama track that sent him to a 40th-place finish and ultimately knocked him out of the Chase — something that wasn’t lost on the Joe Gibbs Racing driver this week.
“Last year we played it right, we were the top point total scorer of the first two rounds and we were seeded the highest guy without a win and we went to Talladega and we sure learned how to throw that away,” Busch said. “I think what we can do a better job of instead of being one of the only guys to race at the back of the pack and get ourselves caught up in something that none of the other Chasers were involved in, is race with all the rest of the Chasers and if they all get caught up in a wreck and we do too then hopefully our point total will all be lower, but all the same instead of me just being the only guy down at the bottom of the totem pole.”
The value of winning early in a round of the Chase is raised to an even higher level in the Contender Round with the uncertainty of Talladega on the horizon.
“When you look at Charlotte and Kansas — the first two races of this round — they’re super-important,” Joey Logano said. “If you can win, you’re going to be sleeping a lot better at night.”