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The Big 6: Questions Answered After Ross Chastain Conquers Kansas

Who… should you be talking about after the race?

This hasn’t been an easy year for Ross Chastain. While his Trackhouse Racing teammate Daniel Suarez won a race and made the playoffs, Chastain just missed the cut and had not visited victory lane except to congratulate Suarez.

Until Sunday. 

Chastain started an unremarkable 20th at Kansas Speedway and spent the first half of the race working his way into contention. He didn’t score any stage points, but he was able to use a caution late in stage two to his advantage. When the leaders stayed out for the stage points they needed, Chastain and others took to the pits and positioned themselves for the final stretch of the race. 

Chastain first took the lead on lap 177, and in the final 90 laps, he led five times for 52 laps. Chastain’s battle of wills with Kyle Busch before the final round of pit stops was one for the ages. Chastain took over the lead for the last time with 20 to go and held off William Byron to win the Hollywood Casino 400 for his first victory of 2024 and the fifth of his career.

And don’t forget Martin Truex JrTruex’s third-place finish snapped a string of finishes of 20th or worse dating back to Pocono Raceway in mid-July. His third-place finish Sunday (Sept. 29) is his first top five since the spring race at Kansas back in May. 

Truex stumbled into the playoffs and made a hasty first-round exit, but he can still end his career on a high note when the season wraps up in Phoenix this fall, and Sunday was a step in that direction.

What… is the big question leaving this race in the rearview?

For a time on Sunday, it looked like he’d put the questions to bed. After waging a battle royal and leading five times for 26 laps, Kyle Busch was on his way to putting some questions to bed at last. Instead, a brush with the wall while racing Chase Briscoe took Busch out of contention, another stroke of bad luck in a season littered with them.

Richard Childress Racing as a whole has struggled in 2024. Austin Dillon managed a win, but he missed out on the playoffs because he intentionally wrecked two cars to get the victory. Dillon is 28th in points, Busch 20th. For the 39-year-old Busch, it represents his least productive full-time year ever.

See also
Kyle Busch's Kansas Dreams Evaporate After Spin, Tight Squeeze With Chase Briscoe

Will Busch extend his annual win streak to 20 years?

The frustrating part of it all is that he can. He’s good enough to elevate his equipment to that level at least once this year. But his luck has been somewhere between nonexistent and terrible, and he’s struggled to find the consistency that has been a hallmark of his career.

Busch could always be counted on to rack up top 10s and top fives, usually backed up with multiple wins. Even if his win total wasn’t staggering, his consistency was playoff-worthy. He’s one of just two drivers with multiple playoff-era titles.

But this year has been streaky: He’ll reel off a few top-10 runs only to finish in the back half of the field for a few weeks. Still, even with just six races left and the odds against him, Busch can’t quite be written off. He’s proven naysayers wrong too many times. 

Where… did the other key players wind up? 

Pole winner Christopher Bell came out to play early with an easy win in the first stage. He led in stage two as well, but a couple of brushes with the wall hampered him. Bell then had to work his way back through the field after pit strategy left the stage two leaders behind a group of cars who pitted with seven to go in the stage. A loose wheel in the final stage ended Bell’s hopes for a win, but he came back for a seventh-place finish. Bell led a race-high 122 laps.

Defending race winner Tyler Reddick never found the speed that he’d had a year ago. He ran mid-pack all day, not able to make a strategy play. He fell back in the closing laps to a 25th-place finish, and sits four points below the cut line heading to Talladega.

Last week’s winner Kyle Larson entered the race with momentum, but that came to a grinding halt when Larson hit the wall on his own in the opening stage. The damage didn’t look terrible, but having to limp back to the pits with the flat right rear tire, which caused extensive damage underneath the car. Despite multiple pit stops, Larson did finish on the lead lap in 26th.

Kansas win leader Denny Hamlin had a good start to the day, finishing in stage one, but a loose wheel cost Hamlin a lot of time on pit road, time he’d spend a lot of trying to regain track position. Hamlin made some bold moves on a restart with 20 to go, passing a half dozen cars, which was good enough for a top-10 finish. Hamlin came home eighth.

When… was the moment of truth?

The Kansas spring race featured the closest finish in Cup Series history, with Larson beating Chris Buescher to the line by about an inch of splitter, the margin of victory just .001 seconds. Last fall’s margin was .327 seconds.

This time around, Chastain bested Byron by .388 seconds. The race featured 30 lead changes among 15 different drivers. Sure, a few of those happened on pit stops; they always do, but the 15 different leaders represent a track record. It wasn’t a crash fest and didn’t feature an overtime finish, but it was a good race that played out organically.

What was perhaps the best battle of the day came with 65 laps to go, when Chastain and Busch battled for the lead like it was the last lap, each with something to prove.

In the Next Gen era, Kansas, a once-maligned 1.5-mile oval, has become the gold standard for intermediate tracks. Not every Next Gen race has had a margin of victory under a half second or even a second, but they have been good races.

This puts NASCAR in an interesting position after fans complained about the racing at Bristol Motor Speedway last weekend. Short tracks have long been the bread and butter of the sport, and, in a sport raised on tradition, they always should be. 

But the last several iterations of racecar have sacrificed one type of racing for another. The current car has done what others haven’t for decades in making intermediate tracks decent shows. The trick going forward will be to make short tracks better without throwing these gains away.

Is it coming to the points where the cars need to be different from the chassis out? With most parts now being manufactured by single sources, does that make a separate package more possible? It would require a drastic change in how teams approach racing, and that could be the biggest obstacle.

See also
Thinkin’ Out Loud at Kansas: There Are No Championship Favorites

Why… should you be paying attention this week?

For the playoff drivers, it might not be a week where anyone sleeps very well. With the final visit to Talladega Superspeedway on the horizon, not one of them has a win to fall back on in the Round of 12. For everyone else, all bets are off, because as everyone knows all too well, multicar crashes at superspeedways are a matter of when, not if, and once one is touched off, anyone within range is along for the ride. 

That means that the best-played strategies can go up in smoke.

It also means that somebody who can avoid trouble and work traffic late in the race can have a very successful day. Because the cars have equal power, a good driver who needs a win can find one. That could be a playoff driver on the verge of elimination, or it could be a spoiler from the outside, making advancing to the next round that much more difficult for the contenders.

It’s a race that fans look forward to and drivers look forward to being over.

How… can the tow-back rule be fairly enforced?

For the second recent week, NASCAR’s crash damage policy was called into question. Following a lap 1 incident, Josh Berry was stranded on track with four flat tires and unable to make it to his pit, but the No. 4 otherwise had minimal damage. Berry felt that he could have continued if he could have been towed to his pit, as NASCAR has allowed in many circumstances, and questioned the decision.

The letter of the rule was followed here. The question becomes the need for the rule in the first place, and whether it has been fairly applied in every situation.

The takeaway from the rulebook is that if a driver spins out on his own (his fault without a mechanical issue) and doesn’t hit anything, he can get a tow. But a driver who gets spun by another driver through no fault of his own is done for the day, regardless of damage, even if he doesn’t hit anything. The act of getting hit ends his day.

That’s a rule that needs an overhaul. The only way to enforce it fairly might be to get rid of it. Barring that, either everyone with flats and no other visible damage gets a tow to their pits, or nobody does and they all go straight to the garage. Penalizing a driver for another driver’s actions isn’t good for the sport. 

Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.


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WJW Motorsports

That wasn’t bad luck and it usually hasn’t been. It simply is the next past his prime legend pressing for that last rush. What is hilarious to me is to see it’s now a contest of the guys with no “playoff” risk as to who can cheat up their cars the most to grab one

Kevin in SoCal

Kyle Busch probably won’t get a win this year. I remember a couple years ago he had one win on fuel mileage, and he was crappy the rest of the year too.

Damaged vehicle policy definitely needs overhauled. A car with flat tires and little to no damage should be able to be fixed on pit road with the usual 7 minutes of time, once the tow truck drops them in their pit spot.