When their resilience is tested in the face of adversity, Hendrick Motorsports tends to respond with achievement in the face of tragedy.
What else is there to do?
So, when the organization lost three-decade professional relations icon Jon Edwards earlier in the week, a man who shaped the careers of both Jeff Gordon and Kyle Larson, the No. 5 team responded with one of the most one-sided dominant performances of the NextGen era on Sunday at Bristol.
Larson led 411 laps, including the entire second stage, only giving up the lead in the final segment to complete green flag pit stops and Victory Lane was an understandably emotional place for all involved.
Gordon, who is now the Vice Chairman of Hendrick Motorsports, entered the media center with tears welling under his eyes and the post-race scene was equal parts a celebration and celebration of life.
“This organization just has a way of stepping up and answering and just persevering in the toughest of times,” Gordon said. “They did that again and I’m really proud of that.”
What makes it especially tough for Gordon, Larson or their peers at Papa Joe Hendrick Blvd. is that they had to come to work immediately after finding out on Thursday. Larson ran the Truck Series race on Friday and there was no taking personal time like most blue collar jobs afford its workers.
Gordon said walking in the facility this weekend was different and it was hard.
“Jon would want us to be here racing and would want us to — I don’t even think he would want us to honor him,” Gordon said, laughing about his friend. “He would want us to not say his name at all. He wants to go under the radar and be this kind of unsung hero, I guess. There’s no other way to do it, any other way for a great like him.
“But, yeah, I think we’ve just — sometimes it’s therapeutic, but it’s also not really an option either, like you mentioned. You just try to learn from it and grow from it and bond together as an organization, as a team together, and I think that’s what Jon is going to do in this case for us.”
Again, Edwards was a legend at his craft, very much considered the gold standard in terms of delivering for both the team and for media members who needed his drivers for something.
“I mean, what I loved about working with Jon is that he would call me out or he would put an emphasis on things that were priorities,” Gordon said. “Sometimes you get caught up in going week-to-week or things that you not always are wanting to put some of the opportunities that come your way first because you’ve got something else happening.
“Jon was always great of just presenting it in a way of, ‘Hey, you know, I think this is a great opportunity, and if we don’t do it today, maybe you can do it tomorrow or another time, but you need to do it’ and if he believed in it, then you believed in it too.”
No. 5 crew chief Cliff Daniels said Edwards would ‘drive me nuts’ because he would always preface conversations at the track each week with ‘when we win’ and the engineer is a little superstitious and hated it.
Edwards, somewhere, whispered it to Daniels too and Larson was ready with the retort on Sunday.
“Jon didn’t jinx us this weekend.”
“He sure didn’t.”
Daniels also recognized Edwards as the standard in this profession.
“I can just think of so many situations in our time together where it didn’t matter who it was or what publication or what media outlet or what driver, team, anybody because Jon had the same high level of care and concern and love for others irregardless of who it was,” Daniels said. “That’s what made him such a joy to be around.
“To lose him as a friend and a teammate is sad and tough for all of us, but it’s almost brought about a little bit of peace and joy for his life to see how many people that he touched.”
Uneventful Race
Walking to pit road from the infield, a fan voiced his displeasure about the race he purchased a ticket and hot pass for.
“THIS RACE SUCKED ASS.”
Vulgar, sure, but it was also objectively hard to watch with Larson nearly going the distance one week after William Byron also nearly went the distance until deterred by a green flag pit cycle at Darlington.
There was a degree of optimism for this race, at least amongst those who enjoyed the spring race last year, because practice on Saturday showed the same level of tire degradation and cording from last March. Instead, the temperature warmed up 20 degrees from 45 to 65 (F) and the tire laid down rubber on Sunday and created a procedural race similar to the Bristol Night Race in September.
From a more nuanced standpoint than the fan in the infield, runner-up Denny Hamlin said sometimes everyone has to just appreciate and accept a team nailing the set-up and executing during the race.
“It probably depends on who a fan roots for,” Hamlin said. “You have to give teams their due when they dominate, right? We shouldn’t throw mud or whatever on a race when someone goes out there and dominates. I at least kept them honest for a little while. They were superior in the fall and they were superior here again today.
“Sometimes you’ll have that. That’s what happens when you have a really good team and a really good driver.”
Daniels was biased of course, but he enjoyed the racing product on Sunday.
“You know, to me today, man, you had lanes across the entire racing surface,” Daniels said. “You had guys slipping around. Go look at the right side of our car. It’s destroyed from getting through traffic and touching guys and fenders. We have doughnuts on the side of the car.”
Daniels said he watched the 2004 Bristol Night Race this week and felt like a form of racing fans clamor for would not be well regarded by the modern audience.
“One lane on the bottom,” Daniels said. “Rusty (Wallace) led almost the whole race until Rusty had a bad pit stop and Dale (Earnhardt) Jr. won the race. There was not a lot of passing for the lead. Not a lot of things that happened. There was no upper lane.
“To me today’s race, when the top two cars are within a second apart, navigating through traffic and every single lane that was available and bouncing off of lap cars, I know we want cautions and yellows for excitement, but from a racing purist standpoint, today’s race was a heck of a race because Denny was coming, he put pressure on us. We knew it. We had to take chances. Man, that just presents such a good race from our seat.”
On the other hand, Gordon said he wanted to see more even though they won, and felt like the lack of falloff from Goodyear was a cause for concern from a racing product development standpoint.
“I mean, I am a little disappointed in today with the tire, I’ll be honest,” Gordon said. “There was no fall-off and no wear. We all thought there was going to be tremendous wear, and there wasn’t.
“But at the same time, I don’t like what happened last year either. I want to say this: Goodyear has a tough job. I think this car, we have a heavy car. Just stock cars in general. We have these high-bank tracks, heavy loads, abrasive surfaces. There’s just a lot of things that are very difficult for them to do the things that they do to make a tire that’s durable and perform well.”
But Gordon also doesn’t think the answer from an entertainment standpoint is a tire that starts chunking and forces everyone to ride half throttle around the track.
“Running two seconds off the pace is not what I think we want in NASCAR to manage a tire,” Gordon said. “So, yeah, … I am biased but I would take this over that. But I still was disappointed to see how many — how few cautions and how little fall-off there was today.”
The one storyline
Outside of Hamlin ‘keeping him honest,’ the only real chance to break up the Larson domination came during the green flag pit cycle that started on Lap 390 and 391 with the leaders coming down pit road.
Ryan Blaney stayed out for as long as absolutely possible, keeping the entire field one lap down on Lap 427, hoping a caution would have trapped them that way and giving the Penske 12 the lead after pit stops.
“Running long right there was really our only play to win,” Blaney said. “We were running fifth before the cycle started, so why not take a shot? I thought I did a really good job of saving my tires to make sure I didn’t have a problem. We went really, really long. I had a lot of people lapped for a while and hung on pretty strong, and then we finally decided to pit and got back to fifth.
“I had third and fourth right in front of me, so it almost played out even better than what it did. It was a good weekend and a good call by Jonathan (Hassler, crew chief) to have a shot to try to do something different, but it just didn’t work out.”
Hassler told Sportsnaut that the decision gave him multiple chances to win the race.
“I didn’t think we were going to drive past the 5 on our own,” Hassler said. “The tires had gotten to where they weren’t falling off so we could run long and not pay a huge penalty. That would give us the opportunity to maybe catch a caution and trap them all a lap down, which would be great for us.
“Maybe we could catch a caution even after we pit and maybe we ran so long that it would force them back on pit road. So we had multiple avenues to try to get track position.”
Results
- Kyle Larson
- Denny Hamlin
- Ty Gibbs
- Chase Briscoe
- Ryan Blaney
- William Byron
- Ross Chastain
- Christopher Bell
- AJ Allmendinger
- Austin Dillon
- Carson Hocevar
- Josh Berry
- Justin Haley
- Kyle Busch
- Chase Elliott
- Brad Keselowski
- Austin Cindric
- Tyler Reddick
- Bubba Wallace
- Ryan Preece
- John Hunter Nemechek
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- Noah Gragson
- Joey Logano
- Chris Buescher
- Erik Jones
- Zane Smith
- Riley Herbst
- Cole Custer
- Michael McDowell
- Jesse Love
- Ty Dillon
- Daniel Suarez
- Corey LaJoie
- Todd Gilliland
- Cody Ware
- Alex Bowman
- Shane Van Gisbergen
- Josh Bilicki
Provisional Playoff Grid
Christopher Bell WWW
Denny Hamlin WW
Kyle Larson WW
William Byron W
Josh Berry W
Chase Elliott +80
Ryan Blaney +77
Tyler Reddick +76
Bubba Wallace +53
Joey Logano +47
Alex Bowman +46
Ross Chastain +31
Chris Buescher +29
Chase Briscoe +15
Ryan Preece +3
Kyle Busch +2
—
AJ Allmendinger -2
Ricky Stenhouse -24
Michael McDowell -26
Ty Gibbs -29
John Hunter Nemechek -29
Austin Cindric -29
Justin Haley -36
Zane Smith -39
Carson Hocevar -43
