Truex rout creates chaos in NASCAR’s playoff field
MARTINSVILLE, VA. >> Kyle Busch is slowly coughing away his championship chances and Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano are fighting — again.
Chase Elliott has fast cars but awful luck, while Kevin Harvick has barely made a whisper in the playoffs. Ryan Blaney continues to rise on NASCAR’s biggest stage and Kyle Larson escaped Martinsville Speedway, his worst track in this third round of the playoffs, as best he could.
It was a lot of drama despite a snoozer of a Sunday on NASCAR’s shortest track.
Martin Truex Jr. led
464 of the 500 laps to collect his series-best seventh win of the season. This one locked him into the final four and the right to race for the championship next month, something Truex fully believed possible when he and crew chief Cole Pearn needed a new home after Furniture Row Racing closed after last year’s season finale.
The move inside Joe Gibbs Racing has been tremendously successful, even if Truex and the No.
19 team have been overshadowed by everything, specifically teammates Busch and Hamlin.
“I wouldn’t have went (to JGR) if I didn’t think I could win a championship,” Truex said. “I would have retired.”
Give Truex and Pearn some credit for the clinic they put on at Martinsville, where the combination of NASCAR’s new rules package and the Goodyear tire selection resulted in lousy racing in which one car can run away with the race. There were three total lead changes and a clear difficulty for drivers to pass, which sapped any ontrack excitement from the opening race of the round of eight. But the frustration was boiling through the field for 500 laps and it exploded with a postrace, pit road fracas in which Hamlin was hurled to the ground by a member of Logano’s crew.
Logano was upset that Hamlin had squeezed him into the wall during the third stage of the race and the incident led to a cut tire that contributed to the reigning champion’s eighth-place finish. Logano won at Martinsville last year to spark his upset championship victory three weeks later.
Admittedly unsatisfied with Hamlin’s response, Logano smacked Hamlin on the shoulder and turned to walk away. Hamlin took exception and chased after Logano, who was aggressively shielded by everyone at Team Penske ranging from his crew chief to his publicist and an overzealous crew member who horse-collared Hamlin to the ground in a brief, chaotic scrum. A day later, NASCAR suspended Dave Nichols Jr., the tire technician who knocked down Hamlin, for this weekend’s race at Texas.
Martinsville’s half-mile layout makes it a tight little track and the fans were close enough to see all this unfold right in front of them. Hamlin, a Virginia native and five-time Martinsville winner, played to the fans when he mocked Logano with an impersonation during his postrace interview shown on the big screen that brought the crowd to its feet.