Truex wins playoff opener; Kenseth is ninth.
Kenseth finishes 9th at Chicagoland
JOLIET, Ill. – The mistakes made by five of the 16 NASCAR title contenders in the playoff opener Sunday were a bit of a surprise.
The outcome? Not so much.
Truex recovered from two errors in a way the others couldn’t, and he showed the same speed at Chicagoland Speedway that he had in becoming the regular-season champion.
“As far as making a statement, I don’t think we really came here to do that,” said Truex, who won the Tale of the Turtles 400 for his fifth victory this season and a Chicagoland repeat.
“We just came here to race, try to race the best of our abilities, and that at the end of the day accomplish what we feel like we’re capable of. That’s what we did.”
Chase Elliott finished second, 7.179 seconds back in a Chevrolet, Kevin Harvick third, another three seconds behind in a Ford. Denny Hamlin finished fourth and Kyle Larson fifth.
Matt Kenseth, the 2003 champion from Cambridge, Wis., finished ninth after limping into the playoffs with an upand-down regular season.
“It’s not what we wanted ... (but) it beats a sharp stick in the eye,” said Kenseth, who crossed the finish line 22 seconds behind Truex.
Kenseth, 45, is winless since last July and out of his Joe Gibbs Racing ride — and possibly out of NASCAR — at season’s end.
“Some people had trouble and we didn’t have trouble, so if you’re just worried about getting to the next round, it was a decent day,” Kenseth continued.
“But I don’t think I passed a soul all day. I’d get five car lengths from somebody, no matter where I went on the track or no matter what I did I was just stuck there.
“(Truex) and (Kyle Busch) worked their way up through the field, and we couldn’t.”
Busch led a race-high 85 of 267 laps from the pole but had a loose wheel and then a penalty on the subsequent stop for a man over the wall early. He recovered one of his two lost laps to finish 15th.
Austin Dillon (16th), Kurt Busch (19th) and Ricky Stenhouse (25th) also were caught for speeding and incurred drive-through penalties.
Truex’s problems came during his first two stops on Laps 39 and 83, giving him plenty of time to recover.
On the first he was busted for speeding, and loose lug nuts on the second necessitated a return to pit road.
“We kind of took that time to make some bigger adjustments on the car that we had really not been wanting to make, just to not slow the stops down,” crew chief Cole Pearn said. “That was where we started to pick it up, got the balance right.”
By Lap 190, Truex was in the lead and pulling away. He won for the fifth time this season and second consecutive time at Chicagoland. A year ago Truex bounced back from a tire failure that left him a lap behind.
“(Truex) has waxed our tail since they started the JGR alliance,” Kenseth said on Furniture Row Racing, which joined the Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota camp for 2016.
“We work to try to beat them, but we kind of expect it. He’s been better than us the last couple of months. (Teammate Denny Hamlin has) been better than us the last two or three weeks. We’ve got to get better.”
Because of his victory, Truex is locked into the second round of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup playoffs. The field will be trimmed from 16 to 12 after races in Loudon, N.H., and Dover, Del.
And because of bonus points for winning stages and races throughout the year, Truex has 58 playoff points — 25 more than second-place Larson — that he will carry through the second and third rounds as long as he stays in contention.
“Really our outlook, our approach doesn’t change from what it was in the regular season,” Truex said. “We go every single week to try to win both stages and try to win the race, try to get as many of those points as we can.”