USA TODAY International Edition
JGR trio had no reason to race hard
Fans might hate it, but the Joe Gibbs Racing cars played the strategy exactly right Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway.
Matt Kenseth finished 28th, Carl Edwards 29th and Kyle Busch 30th in the Hellmann’s 500 — on purpose — yet all three advanced to the next round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
Logic dictated that any driver with a comfortable points lead, such as the ones the JGR trio had, should run in the back, protect his car and try to avoid a big crash. That’s exactly what they did, preserving a chance at a title in NASCAR’s premier series.
The consensus among fans on social media was outrage: We want to watch drivers race, not cruise around in the back! But the priority for drivers is to win the championship, not put on a show in an attempt to win one race, and the conservative strategy helped JGR get all four of its cars into the final eight.
Denny Hamlin finished third to preserve his Chase slot in a tiebreaker over Austin Dillon. Even
Hamlin, who could have used his teammates’ help at the end, said it was the right call.
“With this format, it really is survive and advance,” Hamlin said. “You really are points racing under this type of format. Anytime you have such a small sample size and you’re going to eliminate the bottom four in points, it’s going to be points racing.”
Busch called the day dull and frustrating, and can you blame him? He rode around in 30th or worse for more than three hours. But Busch certainly had no regrets.
“Looking at it, there’s no reward to go race and get wrecked,” said Busch, the defending champion. “So you’ve got to try to survive and do what you can.”
His teammates shared a similar tone. Edwards said the team’s lackluster qualifying results forced its hand and Joe Gibbs Racing decided it would be better for those cars to run together in the back and let Hamlin forage for the points he needed on his own.
“We didn’t want to get caught in something stupid,” Edwards said. “That’s not how you want to race. It’s a long day and it’s tough on everyone, but we advanced.”
The JGR cars were in that position because they had comfortable points leads, and only a disaster would have prevented them from advancing. So the strategy play was to do the thing that would give them the best odds of avoiding trouble.
Even Edwards said Friday that was against his nature and he planned to run up front, echoing other drivers, but ulti- mately it turned out to be the right call.
“It goes against everything you ever want to do as a race car driver,” Kenseth said. “You can’t afford to go up there and get wrecked and not have a chance to race for a championship. So it was just kind of the cards we were dealt, and we had to play them. I don’t think any of us had any fun, and none of us enjoyed it. But it was just what we had to do to make sure we got to ( the next round).”
But for those fans who despised the sight of cars lagging in the back, don’t worry: It likely won’t happen next year.
In 2017, Talladega moves to the middle race of Round 2 and Kansas Speedway moves to the elimination race. That should make Talladega more enjoyable to watch, because drivers aren’t going to want to lose points by finishing 30th. They’re going to go out and race for good finishes to put them in position to advance at Kansas.
“Next year will be a way better race,” Busch said. “We’ll have way more entertainment for the fans with the schedule change, because you won’t know anything you have before going into Kansas.”