Hi there! It's Alanis King. I'm writing to you after a week of traveling all over Texas, during which we got stuck in heavy Dallas traffic. My husband was driving and said, "If we need to pass some cars, I'm just going to put it in the wall and floor it." As NASCAR Cup Series driver Ross Chastain taught us on Sunday, that works. Although I hoped my husband was joking. The NASCAR stories (like Chastain's) are so long and wild this week that I'm going to focus on them, but I'll also note some other recent news: Ferrari has a new Le Mans hypercar; the Red Bull F1 team got its punishments for breaking the cost cap; and Red Bull driver and 2022 champion Max Verstappen won the Mexico City Grand Prix, setting a new record for most wins by a single driver in a season at 14. The old record was 13, held jointly by Sebastian Vettel and Michael Schumacher (and Verstappen, for about a week). Now, back to NASCAR. |
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| Stacy Revere | Getty Images Ross Chastain's Wall Ride With two laps to go in Sunday's NASCAR Cup Series race at Martinsville Speedway, everything looked to be over. The final spot in the Championship Four—the four drivers who will compete for the Cup title this weekend—was between Ross Chastain and Denny Hamlin, and Hamlin had it on points. Chastain had no cars within reach to pass, thus no opportunities to pass Hamlin in the standings. Then, out of nowhere, Chastain puts his car in fifth gear, takes his hands off the wheel, and slams into the wall, throttling through turns three and four and relying on the curvature of Martinsville's outside barrier to steer for him. Chastain passed five cars on track—including Hamlin—with his wall ride, giving him enough points to steal that last spot in the standings and knock Hamlin out of the final four. It was the ultimate video-game move, and watching it (which you can do here) feels like your eyes are glitching. All the other drivers, braking normally through the turns, freaked out on the radio with their respective teams. "Did you see that?" fellow Championship Four driver Joey Logano said, laughing. "That's literally the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life," said Stewart-Haas driver Chase Briscoe, who got eliminated from the playoffs on that same lap. "If I would've known that worked, I would've just done that the last eight laps." "Nothing in the rulebook says you can't, right?" JTG Daugherty Racing driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. said. "Did that [bleep] work?" said Noah Gragson, who was subbing for Hendrick Motorsports driver Alex Bowman. (I'd add the bleeped word, but there are a few things it could've been.) "Wow," 23XI Racing driver Bubba Wallace said. "I guess we just lost on that?" Hamlin asked. The move went viral in motorsport circles and outside of them, to the point that my friends who have never watched a NASCAR race in their lives were calling me about it. I've never seen anything like it. Let's step back and discuss why Chastain needed to launch this Hail Mary. Like I said last week, NASCAR's playoffs work like this: 10 races, 16 drivers, and three rounds of eliminations. There are three races per elimination round, and at the end of each round, four drivers get eliminated. Then, the points reset so everyone starts fresh for the new round. If you win a race in one round, you automatically qualify for the next one. The final round is one race, and the four drivers who haven't been eliminated from the playoffs show up with one goal: finish higher than the others. Points don't matter in the final race; the highest race finisher among the remaining four playoff drivers automatically wins the championship. Martinsville is the ninth of 10 playoff races, meaning we have eight playoff drivers left at the beginning of the race and eliminate four at the end. The four drivers who survive get to race for a championship the next weekend in Phoenix. Chastain survived the cut with this do-or-die move, a flurry of questions in its wake: Will this be the new norm for close race finishes? Will NASCAR ban the move? What happens this week at Phoenix where a similar move could decide a season title? NASCAR said it won't outlaw the move in Phoenix and that drivers are free to try it. But I think (using anecdotal knowledge) NASCAR revisits this situation the offseason. We'll see.
In the meantime, Road & Track's motorsport editor, Fred Smith, wrote a thoughtful story on why Chastain's move should be immortalized and then outlawed. If you don't have your own opinion on the situation yet, it's a good place to start.
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Eakin Howard | Getty Images Christopher Bell Wins When He Needs to, Again Criminally overlooked in Sunday's NASCAR race at Martinsville was the actual winner, Joe Gibbs Racing driver Christopher Bell. Much like Chastain, Bell was desperate: In circumstances that weren't his fault, he needed to win to qualify for the championship race. Let's back up a few weeks. Bell went into the Charlotte Motor Speedway roval, the final race of the second round of the Cup Series playoffs, needing to win to qualify for the third round. He did. Then Bell shows up to the first race of the third round, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and gets taken out as an innocent bystander when Bubba Wallace retaliated against Kyle Larson by intentionally wrecking him at race speed. Bell's car was done for. He started the third round of the playoffs with a 34th-place finish, putting him at a huge points deficit. So we're at Martinsville, the last race of the third round, and Bell is yet again faced with a must-win scenario to make the final round. Near the end of the race, Bell pitted for new tires and restarted sixth. Chase Briscoe, another driver who needed to win to make the final round, stayed out and restarted at the front. Bell carved through the field in the final laps of the race and passed Briscoe with five laps to go, never to be challenged again. He faced almost-certain elimination twice and came out on top. No one I personally know had Bell in their Championship Four predictions, including me. But we've seen Bell can deliver the goods, and now he'll race for the Cup title on Sunday in Phoenix against Chastain and former champions Chase Elliott and Joey Logano. Maybe we should all stop underestimating Bell. Criminally overlooked in Sunday's NASCAR race at Martinsville was the actual winner, Joe Gibbs Racing driver Christopher Bell. Much like Chastain, Bell was desperate: In circumstances that weren't his fault, he needed to win to qualify for the championship race. Let's back up a few weeks. Bell went into the Charlotte Motor Speedway roval, the final race of the second round of the Cup Series playoffs, needing to win to qualify for the third round. He did. Then Bell shows up to the first race of the third round, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and gets taken out as an innocent bystander when Bubba Wallace retaliated against Kyle Larson by intentionally wrecking him at race speed. Bell's car was done for. He started the third round of the playoffs with a 34th-place finish, putting him at a huge points deficit. So we're at Martinsville, the last race of the third round, and Bell is yet again faced with a must-win scenario to make the final round. Near the end of the race, Bell pitted for new tires and restarted sixth. Chase Briscoe, another driver who needed to win to make the final round, stayed out and restarted at the front. Bell carved through the field in the final laps of the race and passed Briscoe with five laps to go, never to be challenged again. He faced almost-certain elimination twice and came out on top. No one I personally know had Bell in their Championship Four predictions, including me. But we've seen Bell can deliver the goods, and now he'll race for the Cup title on Sunday in Phoenix against Chastain and former champions Chase Elliott and Joey Logano. Maybe we should all stop underestimating Bell. |
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What's Coming Up This Weekend? |
Fred Smith here! With Formula 1 off, NASCAR's championship weekend is the only major racing event on the calendar. Here's what you need to know: NASCAR Cup Series — Phoenix Raceway Sunday, 3:00 PM ET, NBC For 35 races, NASCAR's championship format is a confusing maze of stage points and elimination lines. At the end, though, it gets very simple. Four championship competitors are left among the field, and the best finisher from those four cars is the series champion no matter what else happens. Well, four cars are left in the owners' championship. Four drivers are left in the drivers' championship. That is normally an irrelevant distinction, but Kurt Busch's choice to withdraw from the NASCAR playoffs this year due to injury threw a wrench in the works that uniquely left the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team of Kyle Larson qualifying only for an owner's title while his teammate, Chase Elliott, qualified only for a driver's title. The other three contenders (Joey Logano, Ross Chastain, and Christopher Bell) are qualified for both. The split championship is in play in two different ways. If Larson wins, the owners' title will go to his team and the next-highest eligible driver will win the drivers' title. The reverse is true for Elliott and the drivers' championship, which means any of the three drivers qualified for both could still win an owners' title but not a drivers' title. Larson, Logano, and Elliott are the three drivers who have been in a Championship Four before. Coincidentally, all are also recent series champions. While Larson may not be competing for the more prestigious honors, the other two will have a chance to become two-time driver's champions with a finish over their competitors Sunday. Past history tells us that beating out a full field of contenders will most likely result in a win. Christopher Bell and Ross Chastain, meanwhile, are shock inclusions in the Championship Four. Each are relatively new to this level of competition, both in their second full-time season with a team that has any expectation of winning races. Each are also very new to winning themselves, combining for five victories this season after Bell took just one win in 2021 and Chastain went winless in his career to date before this year. Both did exactly what they had to do to get here, Bell by winning at Martinsville and Chastain by riding the wall to pass Denny Hamlin in the standings on the day's final lap. Now both have an equal shot, on par with two former series champions, to become champions themselves. |
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