The Biggest NASCAR Storylines to Watch Ahead of the MyAFibRisk.com 400
At long last the Chase arrives and heads, of all places, to…Chicagoland? The Windy City (well, Joliet) may not be the quintessential NASCAR venue, but it serves as the lead-off batter of the 10-man Chase lineup.
The MyAFibRisk.com 400 shines its spotlight on the 16 drivers who powered, endured or stumbled their way into the Chase. After 26 longs weeks of races since the Daytona 500 way back in February, it’s time to get serious and remove the proverbial restrictor plates.
No more niceties. No more equivocation. It’s all about winning. The regular season saw the checkered flag drop. We’re green for the Chase.
Read on for this week’s Chase-bound storylines.
Slouching Toward Chicagoland
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Richard Childress Racing sends two of its three Cup drivers—Ryan Newman and Paul Menard—to the Chase, but both of them lurch in like zombies.
Menard’s last three races saw him finish 24th, 26th and 26th. He was in danger of missing the Chase at Richmond as Aric Almirola bulled his way toward the leaders.
“I don’t know to be happy or sad,” Menard said in an Associated Press story (h/t OnlineAthens.com) after Richmond. “It’s a long night for sure. The last few races have been really bad for us. It’s been a lot closer than I wanted it to be. But it’s an all year process.”
Newman, too, comes in off a sub-par effort, 20th at Richmond.
“We’ve got just as good a shot as last year when we proved we were championship contenders,” Newman said. “People learned our method. It’ll be a different Chase.”
They’re in, so technically they have a chance, but as Darrell Waltrip wrote on FoxSports.com:
"My opinion about all that has never wavered. If you stumble into the Chase, you are probably going to stumble right on back out. If you aren't running up front and consistent every week, yet make the Chase, that doesn't mean there's some magic wand you can wave and bibbity boppity boo, you are now a major player.
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Menard can’t be considered a threat, but Newman’s past performances suggest he could grind his way to Homestead.
Another thing the RCR drivers have in common with zombies: They’re not dead yet.
Roush Fenway Misses the Chase for the First Time
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Since the Chase took hold in 2004, Roush Fenway Racing’s attendance has been one of the few ubiquities of the playoff run.
In 2015, drivers Greg Biffle, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Trevor Bayne all went winless and lacked the requisite speed from week to week to score enough points and thus reach the Chase.
And as NASCAR implements new rules from year to year, RFR has struggled getting up to speed while the Big 4 (Hendrick, Gibbs, Penske, Stewart-Haas) power their way in.
Biffle said in Holly Cain’s NASCAR.com story:
"Since the ride height rule changed from 2013 to '14 has really affected us on the Cup level.
If you look at that change, which we were excited about and thought getting our cars on the track and what-not, that's the way the Nationwide (nowXFINITY) cars still are.
They still have that minimum ride height, and really we've kind of struggled when that ride height rule came in.
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The final 10 races of the year are a time for RFR to get more reps and experiment, but it may not be so much a question of technology. It may be talent.
Biffle is past his prime. Bayne, while a Daytona 500 winner, doesn’t inspire the kind of promise Kyle Larson or Austin Dillon do. And Stenhouse has proved to be…average.
And, as it stands, so too is RFR.
Who's the King of the Dark Horses?
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There are two kings of the dark horses. We can pluck a dark horse from the drivers who have won a race and we can select a winless driver.
At this point the drivers with wins who aren’t favorites are Denny Hamlin (a championship contender in 2014), Brad Keselowski, Kurt Busch and Martin Truex Jr.
From the non-winners, Jeff Gordon, Jamie McMurray and Newman could sneak into that final four at Homestead.
Keselowski, the 2012 Sprint Cup champ, gets the nod out of the dark-horse winners. He’s been coming on strong of late (nine consecutive top 10s) and drove his guts out in the 2014 Chase. He won a clincher at Talladega and even sparked a pit-road skirmish with Gordon (thanks to a little shove from Kevin Harvick).
Newman has the experience to turn up his performance in these final 10 races. He was runnerup a year ago without a single win, but don’t discount Gordon.
Now that the pressure of simply making the Chase is over, he can hit up these final tracks with aggression and plow his way through Chicagoland and beyond.
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The Six-Time Cup Champ and Four-Time Race Winner Is an Underdog?
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Jimmie Johnson was the first driver in 2015 to win four races, but he hasn’t been the same driver since winning that fourth race of the year at Dover.
Even more unsettling for the No. 48 team is the amount of laps led in the nine races since Daytona (July 5): zero.
These were races where his average start was 10.2 and he still couldn’t get his Chevy to the front for a single lap. His summer funks have been well documented, but this somehow seems far, far worse.
Johnson has a lot of success over the final 10 tracks, though he is winless at Chicagoland.
"Chicago is a great place to start the 'playoffs,' " Johnson said in Jeff Wackerlin’s MotorRacingNetwork.com story. "You need a lot of side speed on this track. It's a little older and it’s a rougher surface, so you burn tires up pretty good. A lot can change there with handling so having a (rival) driver who is uncomfortable at certain points during a run is helpful."
It’s hard to believe that a winner of four races and a six-time Cup champion is a bit of an underdog. He’s the No. 1 seed—not that that means much—but with all the spotlights on Joe Gibbs Racing and Team Penske, perhaps it’ll be Johnson speeding through the shadows with a chance at Homestead.
Junior Rising
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For all of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s popularity, his two Daytona 500 wins and his 25 career wins since 1999, he hasn’t won a Sprint Cup. That could all change in the final 10 races.
Junior, by teammate Jeff Gordon’s standards, has been the class of the Hendrick Motorsports garage.
“Junior is probably the best in our stable right now,” Gordon told the NBC Sports broadcast after the last regular-season race. “He proved that again tonight.”
The No. 88 car finished fifth after starting 29th at Richmond. In fact, what has made Junior so strong in the last three races in particular (all top 10s) is the amount of ground he has made up from start to finish.
His average move up the leader board in his past three races has been 17.7 spots. He started 20th at Bristol, 26th at Darlington and 29th at Richmond and finished ninth, eighth and fifth in those races.
Earnhardt said in Jared Turner’s FoxSports.com piece:
"We're going to try to do it this year. We've got a lot of confidence, and I think our cars are getting better. We were kind of uncomfortable with where we were a couple weeks ago, but it's getting there. The whole company is working their guts out, working really, really hard. Real proud of the effort, and hopefully it's going to pay off for us in this Chase.
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He’s been easy to overlook given how powerful the Joe Gibbs and Roger Penske cars have been driving, but Junior appears to be doing the one thing you want at this time of year: peaking.
All stats came courtesy of Racing-Reference.info.
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