The Defining Moment of the 2014 Season for NASCAR's Top Stars

When you have 36 races, plus off-track incidents to choose from, it can be a difficult exercise to choose the most defining moment of the 2014 season for any one driver.

More often than not, one driver can easily have five or more defining moments in a season, from highs to lows, that take place during a season.

You can arguably say there were more than a hundred collective defining moments this season for the 30-plus full-time drivers on the Sprint Cup Series.

But for the sake of simplicity and time, let’s look at eight of the most popular drivers on the circuit and what we believe to be the one moment that will best define their respective 2014 seasons.

By the way, the eight drivers we chose are not ranked in any particular order.

Dale Earnhardt Jr.—Daytona 500

Darryl Graham/Associated Press

Dale Earnhardt Jr. had so much happen to him in 2014. It started with the Daytona 500, after which he celebrated by starting to tweet on Twitter—and he hasn’t stopped yet.

There was also the fact he was in the last season with crew chief Steve Letarte, who has moved on already to become a NASCAR analyst for NBC Sports.

Junior wound up winning four races, the most in a decade, when he won six in 2004.

He also made it to the Eliminator Round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup before being eliminated, falling short of his goal to win the championship as sort of a going-away present for Letarte.

But when you look at the entire season, it’s hard to pick anything else than his second career win in the Daytona 500. He enjoyed it more than the first, appreciated it more than the first and used it as the linchpin of his finest season in 10 years.

Jeff Gordon—Last Lap at Phoenix

Darryl Graham/Associated Press

So much defined Jeff Gordon this season, from his record-setting fifth win at the Brickyard 400 to leading the points most of the regular season.

He also earned four wins overall, got into a celebrated brawl with Brad Keselowski after the fall Texas Chase race.

But unfortunately, for all the good Gordon experienced in 2014, the one moment that will forever define his season was on the last lap in the fall Chase race at Texas.

While Kevin Harvick went on to win that race, Gordon—even though he finished a close second—ultimately missed reaching the final round of the Chase by one mere point.

That, of course, was courtesy of Ryan Newman forcing Kyle Larson up into the wall on that final lap, giving Newman that one extra point he needed to make the championship race at Homestead, while Gordon was eliminated.

The next time someone tells you one point doesn’t matter in the Chase, tell them about what happened to Jeff Gordon.

Joey Logano—Pit Road at Homestead

Dow Graham/Associated Press

Joey Logano had a breakthrough season in 2014. He won a career-high five races, stretching his overall wins in his career to eight.

He also formed arguably the most potent tag team with teammate Brad Keselowski. It got to the point where if one driver faltered, the other was there to pick up the entire Team Penske organization.

And as it turned out, Logano became Team Penske’s sole representative in the championship round at Homestead when Keselowski came up short and was eliminated in the fall race at Phoenix.

But like Gordon, Logano’s season—for all its highs and successes—will be defined by a moment he will never forget, when the jack on his Ford Fusion failed during a late-race pit stop at Homestead.

After a nearly spotless pit-stop record throughout the regular season and the Chase, the worst-possible thing that could happen occurred at the worst-possible moment in the worst-possible race.

Still, Logano has nothing to be ashamed of. He did much more than most likely expected.

And if nothing else, he came into his own in 2014 and ended the season with tremendous promise for an even better season in 2015.

Brad Keselowski—Texas Brawl with Gordon

Terry Renna/Associated Press

Brad Keselowski was perhaps the biggest enigma of the season.

Sure, he won five races and fulfilled the goal he set out with at the beginning of 2014: to prove that failing to make the Chase in 2013, after winning the championship the year before, was a fluke.

But Keselowski became his own worst enemy at times. He called out other drivers, drove recklessly at times, got into one of the largest brawls in NASCAR history with Gordon following the fall Texas race and generally ended the season with an impression in many people’s minds of being a sore loser.

We’ll chalk up some of Keselowski’s antics to immaturity. Hopefully, coming up short of making the championship round will ultimately lead to Keselowski reflecting back on some of his actions and perhaps see some of the wrongness of his ways.

After all, if Kyle Busch can become a better person to go along with being a great driver, there’s still promise for Bad Brad—or we can only hope.

Kevin Harvick—Chase Win at Phoenix

Terry Renna/Associated Press

Kevin Harvick had the best season he’s ever had in his 14 years as a Sprint Cup driver.

Five wins, over 2,100 laps led and then capped off by wins in the final two races and winning the Sprint Cup championship, the first of his career.

To reach the pinnacle of his profession, Harvick had to endure a lot, including numerous pit-road mistakes by his over-the-wall crew during the first 26 races (the regular season).

But when crew chief Rodney Childers decided to “trade” Harvick’s pit crew for teammate Tony Stewart’s prior to the start of the Chase, everything just seemed to fall in line for Harvick, as if the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Much like other drivers, Harvick had so many defining moments in 2014. And while it would be easy to say winning the race and then the championship was the deciding moment for him, I think otherwise.

To me, Harvick’s penultimate win at Phoenix, one week before Homestead, was the most defining moment of 2014. He not only won, but he also went into the championship race as the odds-on favorite to win it all—and he did just that.

Had Harvick not won at Phoenix, the entire complexion of the final race at Homestead could have been entirely different.

If Jeff Gordon had won at Phoenix and Harvick finished runner-up, Ryan Newman would likely have knocked Harvick out of the final race—and we likely would have seen a whole different situation as to how the season finale played out.

Jimmie Johnson—Losing Brickyard 400

Ronda Churchill/Associated Press

Jimmie Johnson finished the 2014 season with his sixth Sprint Cup championship in eight seasons.

Immediately after that race, the media and fans began calling Johnson a G.O.A.T. In other words, Greatest Of All Time.

But Johnson was far from great in 2014. Sure, he earned three wins, but he just didn’t seem to be the Jimmie Johnson whom we’ve come to know and respect.

And as the Chase went on, Johnson ultimately wound up being almost a non-entity and eventually being eliminated before making the final winner-take-all championship race at Homestead.

If there was one defining moment for Johnson, it was the Brickyard 400. He just seemed to not have the winning instinct in that race that he used to have in his four previous wins at Indianapolis.

And instead of Johnson setting Brickyard history by winning a fifth race there, teammate Jeff Gordon did so.

And it was from there on through the rest of the season that Johnson seemed to not have the same winning attitude, confidence or whatever you want to call it.

We don’t want to say he gave up or didn’t give it his all, but we have to admit that for the rest of the season, we started to wonder if someone had kidnapped the real JJ and that there was an imposter driving the No. 48 the rest of 2014.

Will things change for 2015, or has Johnson reached his pinnacle already?

We’re not about to sell JJ short. After all, he failed to win the Chase in 2011 and 2012, but then he came roaring back to win it all again in 2013.

There’s absolutely no reason why he can’t do that again in 2015 or 2016.

Kyle Busch—Talladega Chase Race

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

Once again, Kyle Busch dominated in the Camping World Truck Series and the Nationwide Series.

But when it came to his full-time job as a Sprint Cup Series driver, he came up way short.

Sure, he won, but just once in 36 races. He’s not going to win a Cup championship that way.

And then he failed to get out of the Contender Round, ultimately finishing 10th in the season standings.

Once again, Busch came up short and failed to win—or even come close, for that matter—to win what so many have predicted for so long: a Cup crown.

As for Busch’s defining moment—good or bad—was the Geico 500 at Talladega, where he qualified terribly (40th) and finished even worse (41st).

And with that terrible finish went his Chase advancement chances.

While we would be the first to say Busch should scale back his extracurricular racing to focus solely on Cup racing, we don’t necessarily think that will solve his problems.

While he arguably still has another 15 years of racing in his career, we’re starting to think that KyBu may very well be this generation’s Mark Martin: He’ll come close to winning a Cup championship numerous times but will never win it all.

And if that happens, it will be one of the biggest shames the sport has ever seen, next to Martin, of course.

Tony Stewart—Atlanta Finish

Rick Scuteri/Associated Press

While the Kevin Ward Jr. tragedy changed Tony Stewart’s life forever, that entire sad episode did not define his 2014 season.

Stewart was having a mediocre season before the Ward tragedy. And even though he sat out three races after the sprint car accident that killed Ward, Stewart likely would not have made the Chase for the Sprint Cup anyway.

As it turns out, Stewart failed to win a race for the first time in a season in his Sprint Cup career.

He finished 20th or worse in five of his first 11 races. For the entire season, he managed just three top-five and seven top-10 finishes, both career single-season lows.

Stewart typically gets hot in summer but not this year. It was one continual struggle after another.

Sure, he came into the season not fully healed from his sprint car wreck in August 2013 that resulted in a severely fractured and mangled right leg. The more prudent thing likely would have been to sit out the first several races of 2014 and give his leg more time to heal.

But Stewart is a gamer, and he pushed on, despite being in pain and not racing at the high level he’s set for himself and that his fans are so used to seeing.

Boil the season down, the 33 starts he made, and one race stands out: his 41st-place finish at Atlanta on August 31.

It was his first race back after the Ward tragedy, but once again, even though his fans cheered him on, Stewart just didn’t drive like the Smoke we know and love so well.

Not only did that terrible finish essentially all but end his hopes of sneaking into the Chase, Stewart would ultimately suffer an even worse fate collectively:

From that point on, and even though he didn’t make the Chase, Stewart was nothing more than an occasionally mentioned also-ran. And that must not have felt good for a guy who is a three-time champ but drove and performed more like a rookie.

We can only hope Stewart bounces back in 2015. But at the same time, we said the same thing when 2014 began and look what happened.

We never thought we’d say it, let alone see it occur, but Stewart has not won a race in a year-and-a-half, not since the spring race at Dover in 2013. That’s a 41-race winless streak.

Hopefully, we’ll see that come to an end early in 2015, lest people start thinking that the defining moment of Stewart’s career is long gone by now.

Follow me on Twitter @JerryBonkowski.