Kansas Speedway fits nicely in the Atlanta Motor Speedway shaped hole in my heart.
Listen, the NextGen car still has a lot of problems to overcome, even on the intermediate shaped tracks where it performs the best. The platform still favors a leading car over a faster trailing car. The leading driver can manipulate the air to hold back a challenger behind him.
That’s a problem and it was a topic of conversation going into the week, too.
But with that said, the surface at Kansas Speedway has aged into such a delightful treat twice a year and it’s reflective of the best things about the current NASCAR product, but especially on Saturdays with a car that really delivers on intermediate tracks, like it does everywhere else for that matter.
So it’s just ironic, or maybe disappointing that when NASCAR had a car that favored short tracks and road courses, there were far too many mile and half D-shaped ovals and now there isn’t enough of them with a car that really favors this kind of racing.
The current Cup Series schedule would be so much more rewarding if the race on the Charlotte Roval was just the Bank of America 500 instead. Maybe, if the street race moves away from Downtown Chicago after next year, Chicagoland could come back because that surface would absolutely rule with this car right now too.
Heck, even Kentucky Speedway looks appealing with the status quo right now.
NASCAR’s current scheduling philosophy, one that emphasizes track diversity and non-traditional venues, would be awesome if the current platform was something closer to the one used in the Xfinity Series.
Maybe, the Sanctioning Body is going to get really serious about tackling the performance short comings of the seventh-generation car but if this is just what this platform is come this time next year, it’s time to load up the intermediate tracks again because these are the best shows in NASCAR right now.
And the Atlanta analogy is easy because Kansas is now that mile and a half with an aged surface that sees cars use every available lane with close finishes. And sure, Sunday wasn’t the barnburner the previous three races were but the Hollywood Casino 400 was also a solid race that could have fit in the peak era of intermediate races from any point in the past 20 years.
Crashed vehicle policy needs revamp
It’s a bad rule.
That’s not to say how NASCAR applied the crashed vehicle policy compared to the flat tire recovery policy for Ryan Blaney and Josh Berry the past three weeks was wrong, because it wasn’t, but the rule is bad and needs to be addressed.
The Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 was barely damaged in the first lap, second turn crash, but it flattened all four tires and thus Berry couldn’t drive off. Since he was involved in a crash, there was vehicular contact, that meant his race was over if he couldn’t drive away from the scene.
But his race was only over because his tires were flat.
Blaney had more damage two weeks ago, and the consensus was that car likely couldn’t have met minimum speed anyway, but this time was the first time that a car that wasn’t really damaged in the slightest was retired by the Sanctioning Body.
Maybe this was just a one-time quirk, an oddity that won’t happen again for quite a while, but it’s not hard to understand why crew chief Rodney Childers was so aggravated. It costs roughly $45,000 per Cup Series race just to show up and NASCAR never gave the team a chance to even work on it.
That’s the flaw in this system.
Every team involved in a crash should at least get the chance to look over their car and see if they can make something of the day. That’s the point of the damaged vehicle policy in the first place, even though, that rule only applies to cars that drive back to pit road.
That officials just drug the perfectly healthy No. 4 to the camp ground, getting lost in the process, just all came across as a very unprofessional look.
Briscoe, Busch ordeal
This one is admittedly tough.
On one hand, Chase Briscoe is in the playoffs and fighting for his championship life and needs to battle hard to stay on the lead lap in case a caution comes out. Catching a caution means one more shot to make an adjustment, try to get their ill-handling car driving better, and maybe gain a couple of more spots to make Talladega and the Charlotte Roval a little more manageable.
On the other hand, Briscoe is only in the playoffs because he won the Southern 500, a race in which a second-running Kyle Busch, equally desperate for a win, did not stay in the gas at any point to drive through to the win.
It’s something we’ve seen before at Darlington, when Joey Logano just stayed in the throttle to drive through William Byron, so Busch very well may have had that same option.
The stakes?
Sure, that Briscoe is in the playoffs means there is tremendous consequence in trying to fend off a race leading Busch to try to catch that lucky caution. Busch is also racing for his legacy, sitting on a 50-race winless streak and trying to extend a NASCAR Cup Series record 19 consecutive seasons with a win to 20.
At the same time, Busch arguably didn’t have to make the move then, and eventual winner Ross Chastain felt that way too, because he said he was too loose to capitalize on that moment. Busch doesn’t know that, and Chastain even conceded that he empathized with Rowdy’s urgency.
All of this is to say, it’s complicated, and it’s hard to blame Briscoe for not leaving even more room. It’s a surprise that Busch wasn’t outwardly more frustrated with Busch too. Â
Playoff drama
Say what you will about the current NASCAR championship format, now in its 11th season, but it certainly delivers consequence and intensity.
There are no shortage of detractors out there, those who long for the Latford System of yore, but there are sporting positives from Denny Hamlin climbing out of his car with an eighth-place result and lamenting the points he gave up in the second round or even by the end due to a series of bad pit stops.
For the second round in a row, Kyle Larson coughed up his top seeded margin of error due to a misfortune that leaves him susceptible to whatever bad could happen at Talladega and the Charlotte Roval.
Tyler Reddick won the regular season championship but has suffered a month’s worth of woes and now is below the cutline.
There’s a reason the aforementioned Briscoe fought Busch so hard to stay on the lead lap, knowing that a handful of positions gained on the next green flag run could be the difference between advancement or elimination.
It’s probably a fair ask of NASCAR to not load up each round of the playoffs with both a superspeedway and a road course to pair with a traditional performance-based oval but series leadership has successfully eliminated having a good points day from a team’s vocabulary.
When each three-race round has such a small performance sample size, every mid-race stage point and then the final result is huge. It’s why William Byron wasn’t content to settle for second and really wishes he had found a way around Chastain in the closing laps.
The old way has merits on integrity, of course, but the new way made every lap consequential on Sunday knowing that unpredictability looms at Dega and the Roval.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter