No ticket punched at Kansas for NASCAR Cup Playoff drivers - Speedway Digest

The NASCAR Cup Series left Kansas Speedway on Sunday night, and none of the remaining 12 Playoff drivers could draw much comfort from the Hollywood Casino 400 that had just ended.

Ross Chastain played spoiler in the first race of the Round of 12, depriving the championship hopefuls of a potential ticket to the Round of 8.

That was particularly galling to runner-up William Byron, who chased Chastain throughout the final 20-lap green-flag run, craving the victory that would have sent him to Talladega Superspeedway worry-free.

Chastain, however, held on to win by 0.388 seconds.

“Damn it, I wanted that one really bad,” a frustrated Byron said after the race. “It just sucks, man. You’re so close, and you know going to Talladega—you know what that is. So just sucks, but proud of the effort.

“Brought an awesome car. Proud of all my guys. They’ve been working their tails off. We’ve gotten a lot of BS over the summer from the outside, and just I know how good this team is, and I know what we’re capable of. So, this is a great day to build on.”

Although Chastain denied Byron the victory, it was a strong performance for the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team. Byron won three of the first eight races this season but hadn’t been to Victory Lane since then.

With the runner-up finish, Byron assumed the series lead over by six points over defending series champion Ryan Blaney and Christopher Bell, but even though Byron holds a 34-point edge over ninth-place Tyler Reddick, there’s no real security heading to Talladega, where a typical massive wreck has the potential to scramble the Playoff field.

Frustrated, too, was Bell, the Kansas pole winner. Though he led 122 of the 267 laps, two brushes with the outside wall proved costly to the driver of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, who rallied to finish seventh.

“Just obviously wish I had a couple corners back, because there were a couple of them where I made mistakes and let a lot of track position go,” Bell said.

“Yeah, to come back and finish seventh after getting mired back in the back is something that is good, but definitely (not) what could’ve been.”

If the Playoff drivers felt pressure to perform at Kansas, so did the pit crews, and mistakes were rife among the over-the-wall-gangs. All three Team Penske Fords had to make extra pit stops to remedy loose wheels, and Austin Cindric paid dearly for that error — a spin off Turn 2 on Lap 157 that damaged his car.

Cindric finished four laps down in 34th and fell to 12th in the standings, 29 points below the current cut line.

Joey Logano came home 14th and is tied for seventh, just four points to the good heading to Talladega. Blaney rallied to finish fourth in a potential race-winning car.

“We definitely have some things we have to work on, for sure,” Blaney said. “Having a loose wheel and having to come in under green there. A couple of things we have to address. Overall, at the end of the day, I thought our car was really good.”

For 2021 series champion Kyle Larson, Sunday’s race was eerily similar to the opening race of the Round of 16 at Atlanta, where his car broke loose and slammed the outside wall in Turn 2 on Lap 56.

At Kansas, the mishap occurred on Lap 19, again in Turn 2. Larson ran over debris, cut his right-rear tire and clipped the outside wall. Unlike Atlanta, Larson was able to continue, but he finished 26th and fell from first to fourth in the standings, just 18 points ahead of Reddick.

“Our team did a really good job fighting and clawing to get better where we ended up,” Larson said. “…It is what it is, but we’ll regroup and move on to Talladega.”

But Larson will get no comfort from that. In 19 starts at NASCAR’s longest closed course (2.66 miles), the driver of the No. 5 Hendrick Chevrolet has one top five, three top 10s and an average finish of 22.8.