NASCAR will institute aerodynamic changes to all Cup Series cars ahead of Sunday’s Round of 12 playoff race at Talladega Superspeedway, the sanctioning body announced Tuesday.
NASCAR R&D Center
Among the mandated additions will be an extended-height roof rail, an extended rocker panel skirt and fabric beneath the right-side roof flap. These combined efforts are intended to reduce the chances and effects of a vehicle getting airborne in the event of an on-track, high-speed incident on the 2.66-mile superspeedway.
The right-side roof rail will be a 2-inch fin made of polycarbonate, allowing air to deflect off its flat surface if the vehicle were to slide sideways. There will be two bevels to allow air to pass through and activate the roof flaps atop the vehicle, which open to help keep or set the car to the ground.
Beneath the right-side roof flap will be a fabric modified to fit the inboard edge of the flap that will function similarly to a parachute. The straight-edged side of the triangular-shaped fabric will be fastened to the roof flap itself, while the cut edge featuring a 7/8-inch divot will fasten to the vehicle’s greenhouse, the roof. The fabric will be bolted into the greenhouse to assure its functionality and stability.
Finally, the rocker box that sits beneath the center of the vehicle will receive an aluminum extension, eliminating space between the car’s floor and the ground beneath it. The extension, which must be painted black, will sit flat on the bottom of the rocker box.
The YellaWood 500 will run Sunday (2 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App) as the second race of the Round of 12 in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.
Carson Kvapil has never been afraid to get his hands dirty.
He was raised by his father, 2003 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series champion Travis Kvapil, to be a hands-on type of racer. He’s worked on every race car he’s driven, including the Late Model Stocks fielded by JR Motorsports that he’s wheeled regularly since 2022.
Kvapil’s dedicated work ethic and skills behind the wheel have earned the 21-year-old an opportunity to advance to the NASCAR Xfinity Series with JR Motorsports, where he’ll pilot the No. 1 Chevrolet in 2025 with support from Bass Pro Shops.
Much like his JR Motorsports Late Model Stock predecessor Josh Berry, Kvapil is a grassroots racer through-and-through.
He grew up racing just about anything he could, honing his skills on dirt at North Carolina’s Millbridge Speedway, where he won races and multiple track championships. After making the transition to full-bodied stock cars by 2017, Kvapil continued to race anywhere he could, from the short tracks in the Southeast like North Carolina’s Hickory Motor Speedway to Midwestern venues like Wisconsin’s LaCrosse Fairgrounds Speedway.
His first Late Model title came in 2020, when he won the Carolina Pro Late Model Series championship, but it turned out to be the first of many. He followed in 2021 with the CARS Super Late Model Tour championship.
The 2021 season became a turning point for Kvapil’s racing career. That was the year he got a call from Dale Earnhardt Jr. with an offer to race the JR Motorsports Late Model Stock in a CARS Tour event at South Carolina’s Florence Motor Speedway while Berry was busy competing in the Xfinity Series at Talladega Superspeedway.
Kvapil led more than 100 laps that day and finished fourth, but more importantly, his performance was enough to earn him a full season of racing in the JR Motorsports Late Model Stock in 2022.
He repaid Earnhardt’s faith in spades, winning four CARS Late Model Stock Tour events and the series championship. He followed that with five more wins and another CARS Tour title in 2023.
Away from the Xfinity Series, Kvapil has continued to win in Late Model Stock competition. He opened the year winning the IceBreaker at Florence, and last weekend, he won the biggest Late Model Stock race of the season, the ValleyStar Credit Union 300 at Martinsville Speedway. He also has two CARS Tour victories in 2024.
Now Kvapil will turn his focus to the Xfinity Series and, potentially, a chance at the NASCAR Cup Series like his father before him.
None of it would be possible if not for that phone call in late 2021.
“I’m just super fortunate to be able to run this JR Motorsports car the last three years,” Kvapil said after his win Saturday at Martinsville Speedway. “From where I was before I got this ride to where I am now, I just never thought I would be in this position. I just can’t thank Kelley, Dale Jr. and L.W. and all the people at JR Motorsports enough.
“Without them giving me the opportunity at Florence (in 2021), none of this would be happening.”
In a Tuesday morning appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NASCAR official Brad Moran addressed a Lap 1 incident at Kansas Speedway that sent Josh Berry to the garage on Sunday.
Berry was collected in an incident exiting Turn 2 that sent his No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford into a slide, ultimately flattening all four of his tires as he spun down the backstretch. The crash began with contact between Ty Dillon and Harrison Burton, tipping Burton directly into Berry’s right-rear wheel and turning around the No. 4 car.
Though the damage was likely repairable, Berry was unable to drive his car back to pit road. As NASCAR Cup Series Managing Director Brad Moran explained on “The Morning Drive” Tuesday morning, because Berry was involved in an incident, the No. 4 car was deemed out of the race and ineligible to be towed to pit road for fresh tires.
That ruling is consistent with NASCAR’s flat tire recovery program, which was issued to teams ahead of the 2024 Daytona 500.
“The rule hasn’t changed, but it certainly can give a different view when it happens and it’s unfortunate,” Moran told SiriusXM. “But the 4, the 16, 21, and 84 were all involved in a wreck on the backstretch. The hit was hard enough on the 4 to lift the car off the ground, slam it down on the ground. And by the way, the IDR (incident) recorder did go off. So it was a significant incident that the 4 was in. If he couldn’t drive that car back, it was out due to DVP (Damaged Vehicle Policy). We don’t inspect it, obviously, on the site of the track. We haven’t got that ability. But the indicator is, you drive it back, you’re good.
“If, however, he just spun and had four flat tires, he would have been towed to pit road under the flat tire recovery program. But it’s really clear on our recovery program and our DVP that if you’re involved in an incident, you have to be able to get your vehicle back to pit road. If it’s just sitting there (with) flat tires, you spun out — we’ll even give you (if you had) a light scuff — that would be one thing. That vehicle would have been towed in.”
“[…] From the reports I had, the car really wasn’t damaged and probably could have participated. And we never want to take vehicles out of the race, and that is our rule. It’s similar to what you know happened to the 12 [at Watkins Glen], but he did have a mechanical issue. But unfortunately, you just don’t have the ability to inspect that. It’s more if they can drive it back or not.”
Moran added that a lift system was also given to teams as an optional device to install on their cars ahead of and since the Aug. 18 race at Michigan International Speedway, allowing safety teams to use air to lift the back of the shock dampeners and all the vehicle on flat tires. The No. 4 opted not to utilize the lift system at Kansas.
While Berry is not competing in this year’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, Ryan Blaney and his No. 12 Team Penske group are. As Moran alluded to, Blaney’s No. 12 Ford was involved in a Lap 1 incident at Watkins Glen International and towed to the garage despite no visible damage to the body, the team frustrated the car was not towed toward pit road. But damage revealed Blaney’s mechanical issues likely would have ousted him from competition regardless.
The rule has been long-standing but officials may consider changes over the offseason.
“On that particular incident, it didn’t feel right or look right, but it was done correctly,” Moran said of Sunday’s ruling. “And it’s, again, something we’re going to review over the winter and it may change.”
The Damaged Vehicle Policy was instituted in the fall of 2017 and allots Cup teams seven minutes to repair damage incurred and meet minimum speed following the conclusion of those repairs. Those protocols were put in place while the steel-bodied Gen 6 cars were still in use before the Next Gen vehicle was introduced in 2022.
“We’re learning, every time it goes out there, different ways this car reacts,” Moran said. “It certainly reacts a little different in incidents and crashes. And there’s certain parts on the car that are a little weaker, but there’s definitely many parts that seem to hold in a lot better, obviously, being the body for one, which changes the game.
“We’re going to go back. We looked at it last offseason. We’re going to take a much harder look. Unfortunately, we had a couple samples that we don’t really like, and we’re going to go back and take a hard look at it and get with the industry and see if there’s a modification that we can do where everybody feels is fair and equitable, and as well that we can perform during a race day without affecting the race and running multiple caution laps and just the show itself. So there’s a lot of items that need to be discussed.”
Nobody in NASCAR history knows the taste of victory better than Kyle Busch. The two-time Cup Series champion has visited Victory Lane 231 times across the sport’s three national series, with 63 of those wins coming at NASCAR’s highest level.
Nineteen consecutive seasons have resulted in at least one Cup Series win for Busch, dating back to 2005. But despite being within striking distance multiple times in 2024, Busch keeps leaving instead with the bitter taste of defeat, hungrier than when he arrived.
Such was the case after his most recent missed opportunity Sunday at Kansas Speedway, where his No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet led 26 laps and appeared on the path to finally snapping a frustrating, career-long 50-race winless streak. Instead, Busch’s move to lap Chase Briscoe mucked up Busch’s handling, sending him into the wall, a skid and a disappointing 19th-place finish instead.
Make that 51.
“I’m numb,” Busch said afterward, clearly emotional and drained. “I don’t know what to do.”
His Kansas outing felt emblematic of the struggles Busch has battled since his last victory, a June 2023 win at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway. Across those 51 races, Busch has tallied 11 top fives. Three of those were runner-up efforts. But consider that he has nearly triple the amount of DNFs, failing to finish eight races in that same span, including five in a seven-week span this season.
How quickly the narrative could have changed, too, had Busch been victorious in a thrilling photo finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway in February 2024. A three-wide dash to the stripe between Daniel Suárez, Ryan Blaney and Busch left Busch third by a mere 0.007 seconds. Or perhaps it changes at Daytona International Speedway if not for finishing second to Harrison Burton by a scant 0.047-second margin. What about the next week at Darlington Raceway, where instead of placing second to Briscoe by 0.361 seconds, it’s Busch claiming his second Southern 500 triumph?
The near-misses, the mistakes and the emotion show this clearly: It is difficult to win at the world’s top level of stock-car racing — even for the best of the best. Not doing so for an extended period of time is enough to leave one of the sport’s all-time greats almost without words.
But those are all what-ifs, leaving everyone pondering about what-could-have-beens rather than the reality that 2024 may mark the end of Busch’s tremendous win streak at 19 consecutive years — which is the longest streak in NASCAR history.
That brings us back to Kansas, where the streak’s continuation came into question all over again before that critical misstep with 32 laps between Busch and what could have been career win No. 64. Busch, the race leader, was running near the wall with a charging Ross Chastain in tow when the duo crept to the back bumper of Briscoe. The No. 14 Ford of Briscoe left just enough asphalt up high to give Busch a lane, but the shut-off of air to Busch’s left front effectively worked to disconnect Busch’s traction to the pavement.
In that split second, Busch contacted the outside wall and fell behind on his steering, ultimately losing control and sliding out of the lead, out of race-winning contention and back into what-could-have-been.
What could have been a fight to the checkered flag suddenly became post-race pit-road interviews trying to make sense of another lost opportunity.
“Just running ten-tenths all the time,” Busch explained to NBC Sports. “Trying to make up speed and cover the 1 car (Chastain), make sure I could stay ahead of him. And the 14 turned down the hill in order to get clean air from the guy in front of him. So I went to his outside to plug the hole and just, air. For some reason, just felt nothing off the corner and hadn’t really had that like that the whole time. … Busted my butt.”
Chris Graythen | Getty Images
So rare for so long were mistakes from Kyle Busch, whose driving prowess defined stock-car racing’s best for much of the 2010s. From 2006-2019 — a span of 14 seasons — only 2011 and 2016 marked years in which Busch failed to finish as many as five races. On the contrary, Busch has now DNF’d at least five times in four of the past five seasons dating back to the 2020 campaign, including three seasons at Joe Gibbs Racing before joining RCR in 2023.
Busch revealed in a discussion with reporters in June at Iowa Speedway that a lack of practice time has hurt his ability to “dissect and dive into the car,” often leaving him searching for a feel he deems necessary to compete rather than finding speed immediately. And it’s in those efforts to pinch extra speed from his No. 8 Chevrolet that has ultimately cost Busch.
Kansas might be the most recent example, but incidents at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Gateway harken similar memories. With leader Brad Keselowski low on fuel, Busch’s dive to Denny Hamlin’s left with two laps remaining in the Brickyard 400 while running sixth spun Busch, dashing a likely top-five finish off his stat sheet and replacing it with a 25th-place finish instead. At Gateway, Busch’s battle with Kyle Larson for seventh on the final lap of Stage 2 ended with Busch in the outside wall and, subsequently, the garage after Busch pinched Larson on entry to Turn 1.
Busch proved three times in 2023 that he can win both in the Next Gen car and with Richard Childress Racing. He was seemingly 32 laps away at Kansas from reminding everybody he is one of the best to ever climb behind the wheel of a NASCAR vehicle.
He still is, results be damned.
But right now, Busch is starving, trying to remember exactly what victory tastes like in the Cup Series. He has six more chances this year to remind himself.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. & New York (Sep. 30, 2024) — NASCAR Studios and Words + Pictures, the team behind the critically acclaimed Netflix docuseries NASCAR: Full Speed, today announced the formation of Full Speed Entertainment, a production partnership that will develop and produce a wide swath of premium racing content, ranging from documentaries, series and special events to studio shows, podcasts and more.
Among the venture’s projects will be the much-anticipated second season of NASCAR: Full Speed, which will premiere on Netflix in 2025.
“I couldn’t be more excited to be expanding our partnership with NASCAR with Full Speed Entertainment,” said Connor Schell, the CEO and founder of Words + Pictures. “The first season of Full Speed was a really rewarding project for our company, and it was a thrill to work side-by-side with NASCAR Studios every step of the way. The opportunity to bring audiences more great racing content and collaborate with NASCAR opens a wealth of possibilities we can’t wait to get working on.”
The partnership will allow Words + Pictures to significantly expand their development focus in the racing space and work closely with NASCAR Studios on content all across the storytelling spectrum.
“Early into the Full Speed process, I knew we wanted to find more ways to collaborate and capitalize on new opportunities for NASCAR as cultural demand for compelling sports stories continues to grow,” said Tim Clark, NASCAR’s executive vice president and chief brand officer. “Words + Pictures is the premier storyteller in the sports content space, and Connor’s team excels in not just generating big ideas and visions but executing them in ways that captivate big audiences.”
“It’s such a natural partnership for NASCAR Studios and for me personally,” said John Dahl, whom NASCAR hired in the spring as the company’s new senior vice president of content. “I have so much respect and appreciation for Connor. We’ve had a great working relationship and friendship going back to the creation of ESPN Films and 30 for 30, and I’m excited about all the possibilities we can explore in this new chapter.”
Full Speed Entertainment is in development on a range of projects, with more announcements expected soon. Emmy-winner Tally Hair, who’s an executive producer on Full Speed, will serve as general manager for the new partnership.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — NASCAR and Speedway Motorsports have postponed this weekend’s NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour event at North Wilkesboro Speedway.
The decision was made in cooperation with local authorities to ensure all local emergency resources remain dedicated to clean-up and recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s impact on the area. Starting Tuesday, North Wilkesboro Speedway will become a designated collection site for hurricane relief donations.
The Brushy Mountain Powersports 150 was originally scheduled for this Saturday, Oct. 5. A decision regarding a possible make-up date will be announced in the future.
All ticket and camping purchases for the event will be refunded to the payment method used at the time of original purchase. Fans are asked to allow 10-14 days for the refund to be processed and reflected on credit card statements.
Additional information and updated schedule when available will be on NASCAR.com/regional.
In further support of the recovery efforts, North Wilkesboro Speedway will host a hurricane relief drive and serve as a collection site for the following:
Donations can be dropped off at North Wilkesboro Speedway (381 Speedway Ln, North Wilkesboro, NC 28659) between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. this Tuesday through Sunday. Items will be distributed through Wilkes County Emergency Management and Samaritan’s Purse to communities in need.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Good recoveries or missed opportunities?
Cup Series playoff contenders Ryan Blaney and Christopher Bell both were capable of snagging the checkered flag in Sunday’s Round of 12 opener at Kansas Speedway. However, mistakes from the No. 12 pit crew and Bell squandered the taste of victory and immunity for upcoming races at Talladega and the Charlotte Roval, where their fates could be determined more by those around them than themselves.
After an unplanned stop to remedy a loose wheel in the final stage, Blaney rallied to a fourth-place result with help from a timely caution, while Bell settled for seventh place after separate dust-ups with the outside wall.
During the early portion of the final stage, Blaney had suspicions of a loose wheel that was all but confirmed by crew chief Jonathan Hassler as he referred to the security of the left-rear wheel as “questionable.” A few laps later, the defending series champion brought the No. 12 Team Penske Ford down pit road to put four fresh tires on and fell a lap down in the process.
“You go down the straightaway and the car just wanders around pretty hard and so I knew something was kind of wrong there,” Blaney said in regard to feeling the loose wheel. “Then it started off not vibrating in the corner and then it started getting bad in the corner and it started getting worse as I lifted getting down into the corner so that I couldn’t do it no more.”
Blaney’s abrupt pit stop came before the window to make it the rest of the way on fuel so the No. 12 team needed a caution to get back on track with the rest of the field — and that’s exactly what they got.
With 30 laps to go, Kyle Busch spun off Turn 2 while in the lead. Blaney found himself inside the top 10 at the time of the caution as the rest of the field completed their final green-flag pit cycle. Virtually everyone came back down pit road during the yellow and Blaney found himself back on track and on the right side of the coin to string together a top-five run.
“It’s not often I catch a break,” Blaney said. “It’s usually bad breaks. It’s not often I catch a good break so it was nice to catch a good one.”
Leading a race-high 122 laps, Bell, who won the Busch Light Pole for the race in Saturday’s qualifying, appeared to be in line for his fourth win of 2024 and an automatic berth into the Round of 8.
But wall contact thwarted a Stage 1 win for the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota driver and he had to settle for six points in the opening frame.
In a frantic dash to the Stage 2 checkered, Bell once again hit the wall, this time more significant as he dropped from second to out of the top 10.
“I felt like I just got a little loose getting in the corner,” Bell said about the Stage 1 wall contact. “I don’t know where the 24 [William Byron] was. He was obviously trying to get by me there so I got loose getting in [the corner] the first time. Then the second time, just trying to make a run on Alex [Bowman] and drove it right in the wall.”
Alejandro Alvarez | NASCAR Digital Media
Blaney and Bell both leave Kansas 28 points above the elimination line heading to Talladega next Sunday (2 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App) but Bell knows he can’t feel too safe despite the cushion.
“It goes away quick so I’m glad that we made some points on the cut line,” Bell said. “From what I saw, there were a couple guys that are way back on the cut line, which is good, but the points go away really, really fast if you don’t perform. So the pressure is always on.”
Just four weeks ago, Tyler Reddick and Kyle Larson were a sliver apart in their battle for the head of the Cup Series class, dueling for Regular Season Championship honors on Labor Day weekend at Darlington Raceway. Reddick earned the edge with a gutsy ride to a top-10 finish, pipping Larson by a single point but setting a course for both drivers to enter the 10-race playoff with a head of steam.
Steam, however, evaporates. The racing calendar hasn’t even flipped to the next month’s page, and these playoffs have already proved that any veneer of invincibility can wear thin.
Reddick and Larson finished one point apart from each other again in Sunday’s Round of 12 opener at Kansas Speedway, and Reddick again held the preferred side of that narrow margin. The rub, though, was that Reddick’s 25th-place result was just one spot better than Larson’s 26th — this at a track where Reddick was the defending race winner and Larson was its most recent victor.
Reddick entered Sunday’s race with hopes of making Kansas a postseason reset, recapturing the sterling midsummer surge that propelled his No. 45 23XI Racing team to the head of the Cup Series class. In the four races since the playoffs dawned, Reddick is still searching for his first postseason top-five run, hovering at a 19.5 average finish during that span.
“I guess for me it comes to just performance,” Reddick said post-race at Kansas. “For a month straight, we haven’t been that great, but we have two weeks to figure it out.”
The issue is that the two weeks that follow include visits to two tracks cocooned in uncertainty, from next week’s stop at Talladega Superspeedway to the Round of 12 closer at the new-look Charlotte Motor Speedway road course. He’ll enter that tricky two-week stretch reeling from a six-position drop in the playoff standings that left him four points below the provisional elimination dividing line.
On face value, Kansas loomed as the round’s brightest opportunity, but Reddick only went backward after lining up 11th for the next-to-last restart.
“That restart was a lot of it. That’s just part of it,” Reddick said. “When you have really good cars you can make incredible moves on restarts and when things aren’t just going the way you want them to inside the race car it’s really easy to have a big mistake and that’s what ultimately cost us our finish.”
Larson figured to reign supreme, based not only on his regular-season prowess, but also fresh from one of the season’s most dominant performances in last weekend’s Bristol Night Race rout. For the second consecutive round-opening race, however, Larson and his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet group surrendered a significant chunk of their postseason buffer.
In the Round of 16, an early crash in Atlanta’s playoff lid-lifter left the top-seeded Larson with a 37th-place finish and a 20-point loss relative to the elimination threshold. Sunday’s Round of 12 starter marked another drop from the standings lead after a Lap 19 wall scrape forced the former Cup champ to rally back onto the lead lap after a systematic series of repairs.
Larson called his Kansas slog “just a long day” — a far different outcome than the Bristol romp where he led 462 of 500 laps. “… It is what it is, but we’ll regroup and move on to Talladega.”
He’ll head to the Alabama speed plant carrying just an 18-point margin over the elimination slash, more than halved from the plus-39 advantage Larson held when the round started. In these playoffs, further proof that the footing that divides those advancing from those ousted hangs by just a gossamer thread.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — “They know that today was one of their worst days ever.”
The results sheet would say Denny Hamlin had a good points day Sunday afternoon at Kansas Speedway to open the Round of 12 in the Cup Series Playoffs, but the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team’s effort was stymied by slow pit stops all race long.
Tallying 36 points with an eighth-place result and fourth-place run in Stage 1, Hamlin salvaged what otherwise could’ve been a poor result.
“It was a great opportunity to lock ourselves in. Instead, we’re scraping and clawing to try to finish in the top 10,” Hamlin said.
During Stage 1, the first issue on pit road came as Hamlin ran inside the top five. The No. 11 Toyota left pit lane outside the top 10 and shortly after the restart, the 43-year-old veteran came on the radio to remind his team that he can’t lose track position.
Another pit stop toward the end of Stage 2 put Hamlin at the rear of the field due to his car having a loose wheel, thwarting vital points when the green-checkered flag waved on Lap 167.
Strike number three for the No. 11 crew came after a Kyle Busch spin from the lead with 30 laps to go.
In line to still hoist the Kansas playoff race trophy, Hamlin just needed one perfect stop to be in the mix on the ensuing restart. Instead, Hamlin parachuted from inside the top five to 16th on the following restart, cementing the day for him and taking the checkered flag on the lower end of the top 10.
“We lost 15 spots on pit road and had the fastest car,” Hamlin said. “We came in fourth and came out 15th or 20th or something like that and you can only pass so many.
“I can’t do anything. I think they’ve got to get some reps and get in a rhythm and peak when it really counts here in the next couple weeks.”
Taking the brunt of Hamlin’s disappointment on the team radio was crew chief Chris Gabehart. Being the eyes on top of the box, Gabehart had the best view to see how each stop played out for his team and why it went as wrong as it did Sunday.
“We had problems in one particular area of the car,” Gabehart told NASCAR.com. “But that had nothing to do with any kind of new or unique choreography. It’s the same stuff we’ve been doing all year. Just players have off days. I mean, you can see it in any pro sport.”
One mistake could’ve kept the No. 11 in race-winning contention to lock themselves into the Round of 8 without worrying about points at Talladega or the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course. Still, additional mishaps were the writing on the wall.
“We were strong enough to get buried once,” Gabehart said. “We were easily going to compete for a win even if we only got buried once. Just couldn’t keep getting buried.
“Most teams here would probably be fairly happy with the day we had. I mean, I think we may have moved up one spot and picked up a few points on the cutline but certainly at Kansas, the 11 expects more out of themselves than that, especially when we had kind of one glaring issue. The car was certainly capable of winning and so is Denny but it’s a team sport. It takes it all and we just didn’t have it all today.”
In total, Hamlin lost 60 positions from where he was when he pitted to where he restarted, according to Racing Insights.
But Gabehart backed his crew despite what happened and what could’ve been for Hamlin and the team, bringing it all back to the human element.
“These are humans doing extraordinary things,” Gabehart emphasized. “They aren’t robots doing easy things. This is … this is hard. Humans don’t always perform their best and today was an off day for those guys. There’s a lot on the line and my group’s, on average, been the best pit crew on pit road all year. I’d put them up against anybody.”
The Round of 12 has begun in the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, and Kansas Speedway provided big gains for some. Others, meanwhile, came away knowing they will need great performances at the wild cards of Talladega Superspeedway and the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course to have a chance to advance.
Let’s take a look at the winners and losers from a wild day at the 1.5-mile track in the Midwest.
WINNER
Despite not making the 2024 Cup Series Playoffs, Ross Chastain found himself in Victory Lane for the fifth time in his career after holding off William Byron in the closing laps to claim his first win since NASCAR Championship Weekend in 2023 at Phoenix Raceway. For Chastain, it was a sweet redemption for a season that perhaps hasn’t quite lived up to his expectations.
William Byron. With a less than favorable opening round of the Cup Series Playoffs, Byron entered the Round of 12 hoping to turn his performance around, and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet did just that at Kansas Speedway after scoring a Stage 1 win and a runner-up finish. Byron left the Round of 12 opener with the points lead and a 34-point cushion to the elimination line.
Alex Bowman. Building on his stellar Round of 16 performance, Bowman, Byron’s teammate, continued his lights-out postseason run. The No. 48 Chevrolet scored the Stage 2 win and ran up front during much of the Kansas bout. Bowman will head to Talladega with a sixth-place finish under his belt and a position eight points above the elimination line.
WHO’S NOT?
Austin Cindric. After a strong showing in the Round of 16, Cindric will have to bounce back following a 34th-place finish at Kansas. He qualified his No. 2 Team Penske Ford Mustang in the 17th position and held around mid-pack throughout the opening stages before contact with Kyle Busch sent the 26-year-old spinning into the inside wall. Entering the Round of 12 already below the elimination line in ninth, Cindric fell to 12th, 29 points down.
Tyler Reddick. Entering the Round of 12 20 points above the elimination line, Reddick left Kansas four points below after a 25th-place result. Still, Reddick shouldn’t be in full panic mode just yet as the spring Talladega race is where the No. 45 Toyota punched his ticket to the postseason festivities.
