Brad Keselowski finished third in the Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway on Wednesday.
Keselowski’s top five finish added 34 points to his season total.
Keselowski started in sixth position and led five laps in the race. The 13th-year driver has collected 32 career victories, with 119 top-five finishes and 193 results inside the top 10.
Victory Lane at Martinsville Speedway is a familiar place for Keselowski, who has two career wins at the track. His third-place finish also marks the ninth time he has finished in the top five at Martinsville and his 14th top 10.
The Rochester Hills, Michigan native’s starting and finishing positions compared favorably to his career averages, starting eight spots higher than his career mark of 14.4 and completing the race 11 places ahead of his 14.5 career average finish.
Keselowski’s third-place finish was against a field of 39 drivers. The race endured seven cautions and 52 caution laps. Prior to the checkered flag there were 14 lead changes.
Martin Truex Jr brought home the win in the race, followed by Ryan Blaney in the No. 2 spot. Behind Keselowski’s third-place finish, Joey Logano brought home fourth, and Chase Elliott took the No. 5 spot.
After Logano won the first stage, Jimmie Johnson drove the No. 48 car to victory in Stage 2.
Matt DiBenedetto finished seventh in the Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway on Wednesday.
The top 10 finish for DiBenedetto added 32 points to his season total.
DiBenedetto started in 19th position. The sixth-year driver has earned four top-five and 13 top-10 finishes in his career.
Wednesday’s race was DiBenedetto’s 10th career start at Martinsville Speedway.
The Grass Valley, California native’s starting and finishing positions compared favorably to his career averages, starting eight spots higher than his career mark of 26.5 and completing the race 18 places ahead of his 25 career average finish.
DiBenedetto competed against 39 other drivers on the way to his seventh-place finish. The race endured seven cautions and 52 caution laps. There were 14 lead changes.
Martin Truex Jr brought home the win in the race, and Ryan Blaney finished second. Brad Keselowski placed third, Joey Logano brought home fourth, and Chase Elliott closed out the top five.
After Logano won the first stage, Jimmie Johnson drove the No. 48 car to the win in Stage 2.
Chris Buescher finished 13th in the Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway on Wednesday.
Buescher’s result added 24 points to his season total.
Buescher started in 24th position. The sixth-year driver has one career victory, with five top-five finishes and 14 results inside the top 10.
Wednesday was Buescher’s ninth career start at Martinsville Speedway. He’s finished all of those races, but has never managed to crack the top 10 at the track.
The Prosper, Texas native’s starting and finishing positions compared favorably to his career averages, starting one spot higher than his career mark of 25.1 and completing the race nine places ahead of his 21.9 career average finish.
Buescher’s 13th-place finish was against 39 other drivers. The race endured seven cautions and 52 caution laps. There were 14 lead changes.
Martin Truex Jr took the checkered flag in the race, and Ryan Blaney took second. Brad Keselowski placed third, Joey Logano secured fourth, and Chase Elliott grabbed the No. 5 spot.
After Logano won Stage 1, Jimmie Johnson drove the No. 48 car to the win in Stage 2.
Blaneys. Earnhardts. Pettys. NASCAR and fathers – and father figures — simply go together.
It was with that in mind that Advance Auto Parts developed the Garage Moments contest, in which one winner will receive the ultimate home garage makeover.
We’re talking epoxy flooring, a steel garage cabinet set, sponsor decals, ceiling lighting, a mobile workbench, tire rack, mesh WiFi system, in-ceiling/wall speakers – plus more! — and an Advance Auto Parts gift card for $1,000.
It’s enough to completely deck out perhaps your favorite space in the house. How do you win? By writing an essay about perhaps your favorite person.
Garage Moments begins June 11 and runs through June 21 — which is Father’s Day, and the NASCAR Cup Series races at Talladega Superspeedway. It’s just the latest motorsports initiative for Advance Auto Parts, which serves as sponsor of Ryan Blaney’s No. 12 in the NASCAR Cup Series and earlier this week was announced as the new presenting sponsor of the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series.
• Complete the entry form and submit an essay in which you share your garage moment with a father figure in your life that taught you everything you needed to know about cars – and life – in 600 characters or less. Don’t forget the photo or video.
• Remember, your nominee is an individual you personally recognize as a father figure. It could be a father, mother, brother, friend or more.
John Andretti grew up in the shadow of his uncle Mario and even his cousin of Michael. But John established quite a career for himself. He won in the NASCAR Cup Series. He won in IndyCars. He won the 24 Hours of Daytona. He raced NHRA Top Fuel dragsters. He won on dirt tracks in midgets and sprint cars. He also was the first to ever do “The Double” by racing in the Indianapolis 500 and then flying to Charlotte for the Coca-Cola 600 on the same day in 1994. He was a racer. If it had wheels and an engine, he was willing to race it.
John was diagnosed with colon cancer in January 2017. He fought the disease, gutting through gruesome surgeries and treatments while also raising awareness of the need to get routine colonoscopies with the program called #CheckIt4Andretti. He passed away on January 30, 2020, at his home near Charlotte, North Carolina.
Ten percent of all proceeds from the sale of RACER are being donated to John’s chosen charity, the Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. You can pre-order the book from Octane Press at OctanePress.com. (If you pre-order before June 21 from Octane, you will be invited to a private Zoom chat with Mario Andretti, John’s son Jarett, and co-author Jade Gurss on June 23.)
Here is an excerpt from his autobiography, RACER, as told to writer Jade Gurss. John describes his second season with the Cale Yarborough-owned team and their victory in the 1997 Pepsi 400 at Daytona.
For the 1997 season, Cale built a new shop and we had really good engines. For the amount of money we had, they were great engines. RCA outfitted my whole house. Every room had a TV! And a VCR. If RCA made it, it was in our house. They were very nice to us.
I would take the whole team to lunch every week. It wasn’t like Hendrick Motorsports where it would be buying lunch for five hundred people! It was buying for twenty or thirty. We were a tight group. It wasn’t a factory at all: everything happened in a small area. There were no politics. If you thought you should do it, just do it. You didn’t have to go through this department or that department. It didn’t always work, but we ran near the front quite a bit.
We had finished in the top-five at Talladega and the next restrictor-plate race was at Daytona in July for the Pepsi 400. We had shown we could run at the front, and now was our time to prove it. As the race wound toward the finish, Mark Martin was leading and I was running second. Just like at Talladega.
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“I’m going to kill myself if this all comes apart again,” I thought. We had led more than half of the race. “I’m not going to run second.”
Bill Elliott was behind me, and he was a lap down with about twenty laps to go, so he wasn’t racing for position. I pulled out and Bill came with me and helped push me into the lead!
My spotter came on the radio. “For doing that, Bill would appreciate it if you would let him get his lap back if the yellow flag comes out.”
“Tell him that he’ll get it,” I said.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out, as Bill fell back into the pack. When you’re a lap down, nobody will draft with you. Which is odd because he’s a guy you’d want to draft with. Why wouldn’t you draft with Bill Elliott? He’s a great plate racer, and he wasn’t going to make a mistake.
I was still leading the race with five laps to go. Dale Earnhardt—Big E, the Intimidator, the Man in Black—was running second when the caution flag came out. Ricky Rudd, Michael Waltrip and Hut Stricklin had crashed. The NASCAR officials were doing everything they could to clear the crash so Earnhardt would have a chance to win. I think they literally drug the drivers out of their cars! Honest to God. There was no overtime, there’s no green-white-checkers, so they only had a few laps to do it. It was the Pepsi 400, not the Pepsi 405.
Under caution, Earnhardt pulled up next to me, weaving his car at mine.
“I’m not letting this guy get to me. I’m going to stay focused.”
I was looking straight ahead at the pace car.
With two laps to go, crew chief Tony Furr said, “You’re gonna get what you wished for, they’re going to throw the green the next time by.”
“Wished for? Who the hell ever thought that?” I wondered. “The record book isn’t going to say, ‘He finished under caution.’ And who cares if it does? I still win the race.”
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But it was all because of that black number 3 behind me.
Tony was telling me, “Make your shifts: clean shifts. You gotta do this . . . and that.”
“What?” I was thinking. “At this point, I don’t need coaching. I need a gun to hold him off!”
Knowing we were going to get one green-flag lap, my mind was racing. “What is Earnhardt going to do to me? He is going to outfox me somehow.” His reputation played a big part in psyching out the competition, so I had to be able to think clearly about what he was going to do. He was going to race to win this thing, and I had to stop him no matter what.
We came around Turn 4, and he started slowing down. He was trying to leave a gap so that when we got up to speed, he could slingshot past me. So I started slowing down, too. We might have been going 30 miles an hour when the green came out! I hit it just right and took off.
Dale Jarrett started behind Earnhardt, but instead of pushing him, he jumped out next to him. Now, they’re side by side. I had a gap, but I had to make sure I could keep it. The more they stayed side by side, there was no way somebody was going to catch me. We came off of Turn 4 and there’s a huge seventeen-car crash behind me, but we still had to race back to the finish line. I looked in my mirror and I saw the rooster on the hood of the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes car. Terry Labonte had a big draft, but I didn’t have to block. I just drove my normal line. Thank God, because I had made enough mistakes around Terry that I would have deserved to have been dumped going to the line. The next lap, he probably would have won. Earnhardt finished fourth.
I was relieved and then I was glad! I wasn’t glad because of all the carnage, but what did NASCAR think was going to happen? Just one lap to finish it? There was going to be a crash, no doubt. And it happened. Luckily, we were in front of it all.
You can’t win the Kentucky Derby riding a mule, and we had a fast car that day. We led 113 of the 160 laps, which felt good. It felt great to win for Cale and the entire team. Our team lunch was fun that week!
The next weekend, we raced in Loudon, New Hampshire. I called RCA and said, “Bill Elliott had a part in me winning this race. What do you think about giving him a TV?”
I took the RCA catalog over to Bill when he was already sitting in his car before practice.
“Here’s the catalog. Tell me which TV you want and we’ll send it to you,” I told him.
“Are you kidding?”
“Nope. I appreciate you giving me the push.”
He ordered the biggest thing he could find in that catalog! That’s what I would have done, too. We had an eighty-inch RCA TV in our basement, and I think that’s what he ordered. But it was worth it. It was a big win for RCA, and a huge win for me. I was now a winning NASCAR Winston Cup driver.
John Andretti struck gold twice in the NASCAR Cup Series. Pay dirt was hit for the first time at Daytona International Speedway driving for Cale Yarborough in the 1997 Pepsi 400.
The win was huge and it was far from a fluke. Andretti took the field to the woodshed that day in Daytona leading 113 of 160 laps including the final 24 circuits. Three future Hall of Famers finished in the top five that day: Terry Labonte (second), Dale Earnhardt (fourth) and Dale Jarrett (fifth) with Sterling Marlin coming home third.
While the win wasn’t the only victory for Andretti, it was the only win NASCAR Hall of Famer Cale Yarborough would earn as a team owner. An incredible stat when you consider his 83 career wins as a driver.
Andretti would have to wait two years before he was able to win again, and that victory came at Martinsville Speedway in April of 1999 when Andretti took Richard Petty’s No. 43 to Victory Lane.
Relive the day John Andretti took his famous last name to Victory Lane in this week’s NASCAR Classic Full Race Replay of the 1997 Pepsi 400 from Daytona.
Though its length was a bit longer than anticipated, the wait for NASCAR fans to see Dale Earnhardt Jr. behind the wheel once more is almost over.
The 15-time NMPA Most Popular Driver Award winner is set to pilot the No. 8 JR Motorsports Hellmann’s Chevrolet in Saturday’s Hooters 250 at Homestead-Miami Speedway (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, Sirius XM NASCAR Radio).
Before waving the green flag in February’s Cup Series season-opening Daytona 500, Earnhardt told the media that the pull of driving grows stronger every day he’s not in the seat of a race car.
“I really miss racing. I really miss driving, and it’s getting worse,” Earnhardt said. “I thought as I got out of the car and the further I got from my full-time career, the less that would bother me, but it actually is getting worse for some reason. I really look forward to getting some seat time, smelling the smells and hearing the noises and just enjoying being in the car.”
This was said, of course, when Earnhardt thought he’d be racing a few weeks later on the originally scheduled date of March 21. That race was postponed and eventually rescheduled for June 13 as the COVID-19 pandemic put the race calendar on hold.
Since retiring from his full-time role as a NASCAR Cup Series driver after the 2017 season, Earnhardt has participated in one Xfinity Series race each year with his JR Motorsports operation. He finished fourth at Richmond Raceway in 2018 and fifth at Darlington Raceway last year. This season, he’ll take on the 1.5-mile Homestead track, where he’s made five previous series starts with a best finish of second in 1999.
Bubba Wallace said he hadn’t gotten much sleep in recent days, an understandable deficit for the sport’s lone African-American driver who’s had plenty on his mind as the country experiences a movement to right racial injustice and NASCAR makes steps to evolve alongside it.
Wallace drove with purpose Wednesday night, carrying more than mere on-track hopes with a #BlackLivesMatter paint scheme on his Richard Petty Motorsports No. 43 at Martinsville Speedway. It netted him an 11th-place finish, falling just shy of a top-10 result after a late-race mixing of fenders with seven-time champ and Martinsville master Jimmie Johnson.
“Man, our car was so good,” Wallace told FOX Sports after the Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500. “Our Black Lives Matter Chevrolet — that’s good to say right there — was so good on the long run. … But all in all, great job to come here and execute, no practice. My favorite place, and it just continues to show. I’ll tell you what was badass, racing with seven-time there at the end, Jimmie Johnson. You think, Jimmie Johnson wins so many times here and we’re running him down. That’s hat’s off to my guys, so good job, fellas.”
Wallace finished among the top 10 at each stage break, his team battling through a mechanical issue that required extra pumps of the jack during pit stops. His affinity for the .526-mile track helped to offset that, aiding his cause at the site of two wins for him in the Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series.
Though he slipped toward the end of the lead-lap cars during the final stage, he rallied down the stretch to vie for his third top 10 of the season.
But Wednesday’s result carried much more meaning than his outcome on the scoring sheet. For the second straight race, he wore a T-shirt with messages of “I Can’t Breathe” and “Black Lives Matter” in the wake of protests surrounding the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minnesota. His statement, lifted by support from his fellow drivers and the sanctioning body, helped Wallace lead the call for the confederate flag to be banned from NASCAR tracks and grounds in a Monday night interview with CNN.
Less than 48 hours later and just hours before Wednesday’s start at Martinsville, NASCAR issued a condemnation of the flag and its prohibition from those settings. Wallace drove home what the event meant to him in a pre-race message to his crew.
“Like that message I sent you guys, biggest night of my life right here,” Wallace said over the No. 43 radio. “I’ll give it my all. … Everybody watching, new faces watching. Appreciate y’all’s support. Support this week’s been pretty unreal, so definitely didn’t go unnoticed.”
New faces seemed to take notice, too. NASCAR’s decision, Wallace’s paint scheme and the sport’s substantial steps toward real change drew new fans to social media and garnered support from famous names in other walks of life — notably NBA star LeBron James, soccer pro Jozy Altidore, actress Reese Witherspoon and Bernice King, Martin Luther King’s youngest child.
“I think it’s great, the initiative he’s showing and wanting to be a part of change, the right change,” said Ryan Blaney, a close friend to Wallace and Wednesday’s runner-up. “I feel like he’s on his way, man. He’s doing a really good job. I think he was on CNN the other night, he did a great job on that. Like I said, I’ve just known him a long time and he’s just Bubba to me. I think of him as a brother. It’s good to talk to him, but I think he’s definitely not getting sleep because he’s so busy. It’s good things, a good cause that he’s striving toward.”
The No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota of Martin Truex Jr. passed post-race technical inspection Wednesday after winning the NASCAR Cup Series’ Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway.
Truex’s race-winning car was found to be compliant with the 2020 NASCAR Rule Book after the 263-mile event at the .526-mile Virginia short track.
With post-race teardown complete, the race results are official. Meanwhile, there were two cars with one lug nut not safe and secure in post-race inspection, the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet of Chase Elliott and the No. 18 JGR Toyota of Kyle Busch. Those safety infractions usually mean a $10,000 fine for the crew chief, according to guidelines in the NASCAR Rule Book.
This is the second year of a post-race process to bring a more timely approach to inspection for all three NASCAR national series. Competition officials announced before the 2019 season that thorough post-race inspections would take place shortly after the checkered flag at the track instead of midweek at the NASCAR Research & Development Center. Those inspections come with a stiffer deterrence structure that includes disqualification for significant rules infractions.
NASCAR will still inspect cars at the R&D Center as needed to monitor trends and parts compliance.
