"It’s all my fault," Busch radioed to his Stewart-Haas Racing crew on the cool-down lap. "Sorry, guys. Lay all that on the driver."
Busch went from two points ahead of Kasey Kahne for the final transfer spot at Lap 300 to six points behind Kahne by the finish. The net loss of eight points — eight positions on the track — came in part because of Kahne’s rally from midrace adversity and deteriorating handling on Busch’s No. 41 Chevrolet over the final 100 laps.
"I thought we were good with 100 miles to go, and then boom — got way tight and didn’t maintain position and so, we didn’t advance," said Busch, in his first year with the Stewart-Haas team. "Gene Haas believed in me, started this team, and we put what we thought was the best effort together. You can’t run 15th every week expecting to advance. That’s just where we got caught here. The lap times that we’re running aren’t top-five lap times to continue to push for a championship.
"So we can run for pride these next seven weeks, learning, building and trying to get all we can."
With just 50 laps to go, Busch and Kahne were deadlocked for 12th place with Busch in position for the tiebreaker, thanks to having the best finish of the two (eighth at Chicagoland two weeks ago) in the three-race opening round. The tiebreaker ultimately didn’t matter as Kahne inched from 22nd to 20th over the last 100 laps, and Busch dropped from 12th to 18th.
With the margin for error so small in the first elimination phase, Busch was left to lament the 36th-place finish from the previous week at New Hampshire when he tried to ride out a tire rub that eventually put him into the outside retaining wall. That damaging blow moved him from a far more comfortable ninth place in the Challenger Round standings to a precarious perch in 15th.
"We made it in, that’s cool. It’s not just making it in; it’s being able to capitalize and advance through the rounds," Busch said. "One little mistake from last week will haunt me, and that was the tire rub that we got. Sometimes you get tire rubs and they go away. Sometimes you get tire rubs and there’s no smoke, which we had no smoke and then we had a flat tire about three laps into that run in New Hampshire. That was the difference-maker."
Busch’s fade over the final quarter of Sunday’s race was momentous enough that it allowed Allmendinger a slim chance at keeping his title eligibility intact. The door closed on Allmendinger’s stated goal to make his JTG-Daugherty Racing operation "the little team that could" as he wound up just two points behind Kahne for the 12th-place cut-off.
"I’ll be pissed off tonight. I’ll be mad, but I’ll wake up tomorrow morning, it’s a new day," said Allmendinger, who clinched his first Chase berth with his first career Sprint Cup victory at Watkins Glen International in August. "We’ve got Kansas in front of us. What’s good and bad about the Sprint Cup Series, youdon’t have a lot of time to dwell on it. It’s one of those things, like I said, I knew we were going to have to be perfect to make it in. I know what we had to manage. We just didn’t get the job done."
For Biffle, his 21st-place finish as the last driver one lap down was not enough. The result was an improvement over the Roush Fenway Racing driver’s 38th-place effort here at the Monster Mile in June, but still left him seven points out of the transfer spot after the 400-miler.
"This is the way it’s gone all season," said Biffle, who was the last driver to clinch a Chase berth at the regular-season finale in Richmond. "We’re just searching for speed and struggled all day today. We’ve worked hard trying to fix our problems, but it just hasn’t come together yet. It’s frustrating because part of you wants to just pull it and put it in the garage and the other half is racing as hard as you can to get in the Chase. It’s pretty frustrating. I’ve won races my whole career, but to be struggling like this all year is disappointing at best."
Almirola’s up-and-down nature in the opening three-race round proved to be too much to overcome in his first Chase appearance. After a rare engine failure derailed a promising run at Chicagoland in the postseason opener, the Richard Petty Motorsports driver balanced that 41st-place effort with a solid sixth last weekend at New Hampshire.
Sunday at Dover, though, Almirola was a lap down by the 45th lap and never found the right handling combination. He closed the Challenger Round with a 28th-place finish, three laps off the pace.
"It just didn’t work out for us. I hate it," Almirola said. "We picked a bad day to run the way we did and we can’t blame anybody but ourselves. My car didn’t have any grip. You can’t go fast without grip."
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