Chip Ganassi has a saying: “Do the obvious things right.”
The saying was on the mind of crew chief Phil Surgen Sunday (June 20) with about 73 laps left in the inaugural NASCAR Cup Series race at Nashville Superspeedway.
That’s when he called Ross Chastain to pit road from third under caution. He was only in third after the No. 42 team elected to stay out of the pits under caution 10 laps earlier, giving him the lead.
“Your fuel window’s open,” Surgen told Frontstretch. “We’re 15 laps short. We got to pit.”
Chastain’s response came soon after Surgen’s instruction to pit.
“We’re in this bed, shouldn’t we lay in it?”
Over the next 68 caution-free laps, on tires 10 laps fresher compared to what the fuel-saving leaders were running, Chastain charged through the field. That charge earned Chastain a second-place finish and his second career top five in Cup competition, his first on an oval.
The Ganassi driver had a different tune after the checkered flag.
“I’m sorry I doubted you,” Chastain told Surgen.
Chastain called the last 68 laps of Sunday’s race “humbling,” later adding, “I don’t expect to run second yet. I’m still learning.”
In the moment of his last pit stop, Chastain thought “there would be more cautions.
“They know better than I do,” he said. “They also knew that we could make it to the end. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. So we would have to pit under green there even if we stayed in the top four or five. … I am sorry that I doubted them. Heat of the moment in the car. It’s really hot. I’m sweaty and tired. And I’m like, ‘Man, we’re running third and we’re gonna we’re gonna give this up.’ … I need to just drive.”
The second top five of Chastain’s Cup career came in his 97th start and after a bad qualifying run forced him to start 19th. It’s also his first top-10 finish on a non-superspeedway oval.
It’s part of a string of three top-10 finishes in four races for Chastain. He finished fourth at Circuit of the Americas in the rain before placing seventh at Sonoma Raceway.
“Finally on a regular old circle track, that’s all I’m happy about,” Chastain said. “The road courses that I don’t really know why it’s happening. Like here, I know why. I know what we did. I know what I’m doing to drive the car and rule courses, I’m just like, taking it all in. It’s not really pre-planned. This is pre-planned.”
Surgen called the race a “great team building day” the 42 team “really needed.
“We have been quietly building consistency and fast yards,” Surgen said. “We had a rough few races.”
The No. 42 team started the season with just one finish better than 17th in the first five races. Surgen said the team’s chemistry with Chastain really began to gel in trace No. 6, the March 21 event at Atlanta Motor Speedway. The process has been slowed by a lack of practice.
“First few races are kind of a roll of the dice,” Surgen explained. “‘What does Ross want to feel?’ We make our best guess. And we’ve been improving on it since … We’ve identified where he likes the balance of the car to be and most importantly, I think the races where we were building and making progress together built confidence in him and it builds confidence in me and we’re able to communicate better now and just everything’s kind of helped itself.
“You know, it’s all so simple.”
The result of that simplicity was on display Sunday.
“It’s getting to a point where I can hustle,” said Chastain.
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.