By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing editor
Cutdown weekend winnows the field in both NASCAR and INDYCAR as the seasons head toward their final laps.
(NASCAR)—Kyle Larson won a wild last race of the first playoff round for the NASCAR Cup championship and will lead twelve drivers into the second round. Four drivers have fallen by the wayside and cannot finish higher than 13th this year regardless of how they run the next seven races.
The long race at one of NASCAR’s shortest tracks is known for generating short tempers, and the crowd saw them on display in the pits after the race when Kevin Harvick (still in his helmet) and Chase Elliott got into an angry discussion of Elliott’s maneuver that Harvick claimed cost him the race.
Harvick, winless this year, challenged Elliott for the lead with 35 laps to go. Contact between the two cars left Elliott with a cut tire. He lost three laps during a pit stop and came out right behind Harvick, Elliott’s better grip helped him get past Harvick and stay ahead of him by running Harvick’s line while Larson closed, and passed Harvick for the lead with three laps left and beat him to the finish by about two-tenths of a second.
The victory is Larson’s sixth of the year, the most of any driver. Elliott wound up 25th.
Harvick and Elliott had heated words as soon as their cars stopped in the pits. NASCAR officials got between them before things went beyond verbal. Harvick called Elliott’s blocking move “a temper tantrum” and a “chicken (expletive) move.” He said he told Elliott he wanted to “rip his freaking head off.” Elliott said Harvick’s bump of him in passing for the lead is “something he does all the time. He runs into your left side constantly at other tracks….Did it to me in Darlington a few weeks ago because he was racing me…I don’t care who he is or how long he’s been doing it, I’m going to stand up for myself and my team and we’re going down the road.”
Bristol was the final race in the first three-race round of the playoffs. Both Elliott and Harvick will be in the second round. But Aric Almirola, Tyler Reddick, Kurt Busch, and Michael McDowell have been eliminated. Reddick was 12th in the race; Almirola 18th,Busch 19th, and McDowell 24th.
Harvick is seeded twelfth for the second three-race elimination round. Larson retains his lead but Martin Truex Jr., takes over the second seed because he has four wins for the year, ahead of Denny Hamlin, with only one. Ryan Blaney, Kyle Busch, and Elliott fill slots 4-6. Then it’s Alex Bowman, William Byron, and Joey Logano, with Brad Keselowski, Christopher Bell and Harvick filling out the rest of the bracket.
The major teams in NASCAR dominate the remaining competitors. Four of the twelve drivers are from Hendrick Motorsports. Four are with Joe Gibbs Racing. Three represent Team Penske. Harvick, who drivers for Stewart-Haas, is the only other driver still in the hunt.
Unlike other major sports, dropping out of playoff contention in NASCAR does not mean leaving the weekly competition. The twelve remaining playoff competitors still have to compete against two dozen other drivers in every race.
The field will be cut to eight after the next three races, then to four after three more, and those four will be the only drivers in a field of about 38 cars in the year’s final race who can compete for the Cup. Whoever has the best finish in the final race, even if not winning, will be the 2021 NASCAR Cup champion.
Harvick and Elliott, who continued their discussion behind closed doors after the race, will be back on track along with all the other drivers next Sunday at Las Vegas.
(INDYCAR)—-Alex Palou’s second place finish at Laguna Seca has expanded his points lead over challenger Pato O’Ward and Josef Newgarden, the only two drivers with any reasonable hopes of catching him in the series’ last race.
Colton Herta dominated from the pole, giving up the lead to Romain Grosjean for four laps of the 72-lap race, and those during pit stops. Palou chased him for the last part of the race but came up almost two seconds short. It’s Herta’s second win at Laguna Seca, his fifth in his three-year INDYCAR career, one more than his father, Bryan, accumulated in thirteen years on the circuit. His father, Bryan, is now his race manager.
Palou now leads O’Ward by 35 points and two-time champion Josef Newgarden by 48 heading into next weekend’s finale on the streets of Long Beach. He will clinch his first championship if he finishes 11th or better.
The contest for INDYCAR Rookie of the year between Grosjean and Scott McLaughlin remains tight with only twenty points separating the two. Grosjean, who started 13th, ran a scintillating last segment of the race, cutting his separation from Herta by a second or more (sometimes two), lap after lap. He was down ten seconds with nine laps to go but he could get no closer than 3.7-seconds when Herta took the checkered flag.
This will be the sixteenth straight year the INDYCAR championship will be decided at the season’s last race. INDYCAR does not have a playoff system, as NASCAR does.
(SCHEDULES)—Missourians who like big-time auto racing will have no races in the state next year, as usual, but will have plenty of races within day-trip distance (depending on where they live, of course). INDYCAR’s 2022 schedule, just announced, has two races at the Indianapolis Speedway in May including the 500, a double-header return to Iowa June 23-24, and at Nashville and Gateway (World Wide Technology Raceway) across the river from St. Louis in August.
NASCAR will run at the Kansas Speedway, across the line from Kansas City, on May 15 and September 11, and will have its first Cup race ever at Gateway on June 5. Nashville comes up on June 26. The second race on the Indianapolis Speedway Road Course will be July 31.
By the way—-
Before promoters built the Kansas Speedway, an effort was made to gain state support for a major track near Kansas City International Airport, the Missouri legislature thought the idea wasn’t worth state financial incentives and passed.
(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 returns for the Grand Prix of Russia at the Sochi circuit next Sunday, the first race since the Monza dustup between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. Verstappen has been slapped with a three-place grid penalty for the start of the race.
(Photo credits: NASCAR/Jared C. Tilton-Getty Images, and Bob Priddy)