BRISTOL, Tenn. — Josh Berry’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs ended in flames at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday night.
The No. 21 Ford started showing flames on the right front on Lap 74 and brought his car to pit road two laps later. Smoke billowed into the cockpit, forcing Berry from the car with help from his crewmen as safety personnel worked to extinguish the fire.
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Berry entered the Bass Pro Shops Night Race 45 points below the cutline, likely needing to win to advance to the Round of 12. He will end the Round of 16 with three consecutive last-place finishes.
Teams encountered high tire wear with the addition of a new right-side tire, adding to the nuance of Saturday’s cutoff race. The No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing team believes the excess rubber that came off those tires contributed to the mechanical failure Berry experienced Saturday night.
“The best that I can tell is it was the rubber buildup on the header (that caused the fire), and then that just spread to the rocker (panel),” crew chief Miles Stanley told NASCAR.com. “And once the rocker catches, you’re kind of hosed. I didn’t really see how quickly it progressed; it seemed to progress really quickly. And then, like I said, once the rocker was on fire, there really wasn’t a whole lot we could do.”
Berry said the issue began in earnest about seven laps before he brought the car to the team’s attention.
“We started getting some smoke in the cockpit,” Berry said, “and then the longer I went, the darker the smoke got. And obviously by the time we got on pit road, it was completely black smoke. So yeah, obviously something caught on fire.”
The flames never breached the cockpit, Berry explained, but the plumes of smoke became too much to endure.
“A few things happened there,” Stanley said. “Once we got in the box, we tried to get the road crew out to get the fire out on the right side, and then the right-side window got taken out. And when that got taken out, a bunch of oxygen came in, and then all the foam went up (in flames).”
The high tire wear is exactly what Berry believed could have played into his hands. A win in Saturday’s race would have propelled the sophomore driver into the Round of 12 after a dismal start to his first postseason appearance. Instead, he was sidelined before the conclusion of Stage 1.
“Just disappointing, again,” Berry said. “Our car was really good. That was going to fall right into our wheelhouse, I feel like, to have a really good night. We were able to make it pretty long on that first set (of tires) and we were going to be set up in a really good spot, I think.
“This one’s going to be hard to watch because it looks like it’s gonna be a lot of fun.”
Even though the tire wear would have played into his favor, Berry admitted that “it definitely caught me off guard.”
“I was fully convinced it was going to be hammer down,” Berry said. “But I could tell probably 15 or 20 laps into the race, we were running like 16.10s (lap times). And you could see some people start coming back to us, and you can tell, right? I mean, the pace yesterday in practice was 15.70s, 15.80s, hammer down the whole time.
“And when we’re in the 16s that quick, I was like, you can tell that’s going on. You can see the marbles start developing, and yeah, man, it’s crazy.”
Saturday night marked three consecutive weeks of last-place finishes for Berry after early-race mishaps. The playoffs began at Darlington Raceway, where after qualifying third, Berry’s car bottomed out through Turn 2 on the opening lap and spun out, sending him into the garage for repairs. Last week at World Wide Technology Raceway, the No. 21 car went spinning at Lap 36 after errant contact by Chase Elliott. How does Berry move forward after three weeks of worst-case scenarios competitively?
“Better than three last-place finishes,” Berry smiled. “Len (Wood, team co-owner and chief operating officer) was saying before the race he never thought they had two in a row and now we’ve got three in a row.”
If there’s solace to be found, it’s that all three incidents were largely out of Berry’s control. The outcomes have been miserable in recent weeks, but Stanley remains optimistic heading into the final seven races of the season, which includes a stop at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he, Berry and Co. won in March.
“We just keep building fast cars and bring fast cars to the race track, and that’s all we can do,” Stanley said. “We’ll try and win some races here coming up in this stretch.”