Two conflicting things can be true.
It can be true that Bubba Wallace is a top-three NASCAR Cup Series driver when it comes to the various restart metrics like passing and retention, etc. but it was also true that the 23XI Racing driver fell short of that standard when he needed to the most on Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway.
As a result, Wallace opened the door for William Byron to take him three-wide with Chase Briscoe and was forced to accept a third-place finish on an afternoon in which he led the most laps from the pole.
That, combined with 11 stage points, was actually enough to offer him a viable path over the next two weeks to advance in the playoffs on points but the automatic ticket was right there for the taking.
“Really needed a win there, and it was a good showing,” Wallace said after the race. “I don’t know where that puts us. I don’t really care, but I know what I did and I choked.”
He’s up to ninth on the playoff grid, two points behind Kyle Larson, who himself had a good showing combined with something that might be articulated in the same fashion as Wallace.
Larson puzzled
Kyle Larson, who led the second most number of laps and won the other stage, spun under Wallace while racing for the lead with 20 laps to go. Wallace held him tight a full lap after a restart and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 snapped around in a way that Larson just didn’t anticipate.
“With the NextGen car, that hasn’t been an issue,” Larson said. “I was trying to get my shape into (Turn) 1 and just should have given more space.”
Larson said he should have just given Wallace more space with the expectation that the bottom would eventually win out.
“I was just trying to get it too quickly and lost it all in the corner,” he said.
To his point, that snap around on the bottom was a characteristic of the old car but this car has so little sideforce that it’s not prone to breaking around the way it did, so then it might have just been a byproduct of the racing surface or some other factor.
Larson at one point had a six second lead, arguably the car to beat, but wasn’t around by the finish.
So much misfortune
Larson wasn’t alone in the shoulda, woulda, coulda camp as several other playoff contenders suffered dreadful misfortunes without the offsetting grace of stage points throughout the race.
Tyler Reddick
Ryan Blaney
Kyle Busch
It’s no secret, with Blaney, that Team Penske just hasn’t had the consistent speed needed to compete for this championship all season. Joey Logano was eliminated last weekend at Bristol because his season was not good enough to build a buffer between the kind of misfortune he suffered in the first round.
Despite earning six valuable stage points on a strategic gambit (right sides only) by the end of the second stage, a pit road speeding penalty once again relegated Blaney to around 20th when he was caught up in a multi-car crash.
That incident began with Reddick getting into the wall and stacking the others behind him en route to a 25th place finish.
“Just sucked,” Reddick said. “That’s pretty much it, honestly. Great car, nothing to show for it.”
He did win the first stage on a tire gambit of his own, earning 10 points in the process, but it was all offset by the results.
Earlier in the race, Busch reported a right front vibration and was just trying to make it to the end when it snapped around and sent him into the wall hart.
“I felt like I had a flat right front (tire) and I was going to come to pit road,” Busch said. “I second-guessed it and said ‘I don’t think so, man. It’s just something is wrong.. something isn’t right, but it’s not a flat.’
“And just all on its own, just turned into the bottom of the race track in turn one and it just swapped ends on me. That’s the rear, not the front, not having grip … so I just don’t know.”
Updated playoff grid
William Byron, Advances with win
Denny Hamlin +37
Chris Buescher +22
Christopher Bell +20
Martin Truex Jr. +19
Ross Chastain +12
Brad Keselowski +8
Kyle Larson +2
—
Bubba Wallace -2
Tyler Reddick -3
Ryan Blaney -11
Kyle Busch -17
So now, once again, one of the expected championship favorites has some work to do but it’s Larson this time.
“Our race cars are crazy fast so hopefully we can get through Talladega unscathed and have a good ROVAL,” he said.
Reddick was emerging as a threat after winning at Kansas but now is below the cutline.
“Nothing changes; we just move on,” he says.
Survive and advance
Once again owing to the roller coaster experience that is the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, Ross Chastain finished second after spending the first stage outside of the top-10 despite starting fifth. They battled to eighth by the end of the second stage, then developed a throttle sensor issue that threatened to unravel their entire race.
“It was terrible,” Chastain said. “You push the gas and it ain’t got no gas. I noticed something on a few cautions like having the car off in third gear, clutching, dropped the clutch with the ignition on, and it kind of stumbled, but I thought I just had it too low of RPM.
“Then I pit, and that pitstop is when it had already failed, and it wouldn’t go. I’m part throttle to get it fired, and it doesn’t think I’m doing anything.”
Then, through some more pit road gambits, they got track position and made the car better until it was capable of racing for a win, remarkably.
And now they control their own playoff destiny.
“I don’t know about those,” he said. “I only care about here, and I just want to run good at the track I’m at. We go to Talladega and the Roval, we’ll just go try to perform like we did today. If it’s not looking good, just what does the next lap take, what does the next breath take, and whenever we do the right things, those races, they give out the same amount of points as this one and we’ll go and race them the same way.”
It was a similar dynamic for Denny Hamlin, who suffered a run-in with teammate Ty Gibbs on pit road, or their teammate Martin Truex Jr. who was involved in a pair of incidents in which he came out unscathed. One of those crashes, very lightly, involved Brad Keselowski.
Hamlin and Keselowski finished in the top-10 while Truex finished 17th — but they all finished when so many of their playoff peers couldn’t say the same things.
The 24’s legacy
It took all this time to circle back to Byron, who also scored the 300th career Cup Series victory for Hendrick Motorsports, fitting considering most of those wins belonged to Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon in the same No. 24 entry.
It’s also his sixth win of the season, approaching a Gordon-like campaign, with a victory that automatically advances him into the Round of 8 — bypassing the wild card races that are Talladega and the Charlotte ROVAL.
“You don’t really control your destiny at Talladega, and then the other two could go either way,” Byron said. “You can have a good car, you can have a bad day and crash or whatever.
“That makes it nerve-racking in this round, so it’s always an accomplishment to get to the Round of 8. So excited about that.”
Byron is driving the Jeff Gordon car, having grown up a fan of Jimmie Johnson, who drove to Hendrick Motorsports’ 200th win in 2007 — a car co-owned by Johnson.
It’s all full-circle stuff really.
“It’s really special,” Byron said. “Growing up a Hendrick Motorsports fan, I watched win No. 200 on TV when Jimmie won that race. I always felt like obviously the gold standard was Hendrick Motorsports, so if I could ever drive for them, once I started having success in my own career, that was the goal.
When I met Mr. Hendrick when I was 14 at JR Motorsports (in the Late Model program) I told him that driving for him was my goal.”
Byron worked through the ranks, reconnected with Hendrick after a stint at Kyle Busch Motorsports and Toyota, and the rest was history.
“He committed to me, and even through my rookie season and 2019 and all those years that I was kind of struggling, he just committed and kept encouraging me,” Byron said. “I’m super thankful to him, and to give him 300 is really cool.”
Perhaps another championship is next.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.