DOVER, Del. — Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates entered Sunday’s race at Dover International Speedway with both drivers — Jamie McMurray and Kyle Larson — seemingly on their way to advancing in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
They left with 25th- and 40th-place finishes and no drivers in the Chase.
And there certainly was plenty of disappointment.
“Horrible day for our organization,” McMurray said, as he stood in the garage midway through the event while his team worked feverishly to repair the No. 1 Chevrolet.
An electrical issue, believed to be the result of a valve train failure, began creating problems for the No. 1 team around Lap 73 of the 400-lap event in the form of a vibration. It returned about 70 laps later, as McMurray & Co. tried to keep the car on track as long as possible.
“You have wishful thinking at that point,” McMurray said. “No one wants to stay out and blow up, not to oil the track down. Also it’s hard to diagnose the problem if the motor’s blown up. Because you’re in a position this weekend where you just have to go for it and what you hope is you’ve got something as simple as a plug wire or a spark plug that you can replace and the motor’s not going to grenade. We came here and looked at it, and actually on the digital dash, we have a little diagnosis page and nothing is showing up, so we didn’t know what was wrong. We were just going to salvage as long as we could.”
Circumstances went from slightly hopeful to dismal, as McMurray reported being down one cylinder, then two, before his No. 1 Chevrolet ultimately blew its motor, smoke billowing to bring out the caution flag and end his day prematurely. McMurray’s teammate, Larson, finished the race, but a string of unfortunate events led to the No. 42 missing out on the next round of the Chase and handing the final spot to Austin Dillon.
“Nice Christmas present for Austin there, by both Ganassi cars,” Larson said on pit road after the race.
Larson’s monster-sized battle began at Lap 38 when his No. 42 Chevrolet lost power. After a stop on pit road, his car was able to get running again — but too many men over the wall forced Larson to serve a pass-through penalty that left him facing an uphill battle.
“I guess my whole stock car career kind of piled up into the first 50 laps there with bad luck,” Larson said. “We probably would have been all right if we didn’t have too many men over the wall because we only lost a lap getting the battery back going good and then I had to do the drive-through and lost another two laps.
“So, once you get down more than one lap really, you’re kind of screwed here. We just kept fighting — well, I mean, not really I guess fighting; there wasn’t much we could do.”
Larson’s early departure from the Chase particularly came as a surprise. Many picked the 24-year-old driver as a dark horse to win the championship this season after his first career win at Michigan. And both Larson and McMurray have shown promise and speed in recent weeks.
McMurray takes comfort in that.
“(It’s) very unfortunate and (I’m) disappointed but very proud of the organization,” McMurray said. “Where our cars started the year at and where we are right now, we made huge progress.
“If you race every single weekend, you know that the most frustrating part of the sport is to run bad. And the fact that we’ve run so well, we’ll just have things like that happen. So, nobody’s down — we’re frustrated, mad, that we’re still here watching the race but having good cars is what it’s really all about.”
His teammate echoed his sentiments.
“We have good speed with our race team and the Target Chevrolet is fast week in and week out,” Larson said. “So I can still run for a top-five in points. I think I can finish fifth at best. So we are going to try and do everything we can to do that or at least try and finish as high up as we can and get a couple of wins.
“I still have some really good tracks for me that are left in the Chase. So we are just going to dig deep and work hard and try and get ourselves some more wins.”
After the crowd cleared, Larson sat on the wall and talked with his crew members. It may be the end of his Chase run, but not his season.
Time to get to work.
