NASCAR Notes: 11 Different Winners This Season
LONG POND, Pa. — Winning Sunday at Pocono Raceway, Chase Briscoe became the 11th driver to earn a spot in the 16-driver NASCAR Cup Series Playoff field.
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver was the sixth different winner in the last eight races.
“To finally deliver a win is such an awesome feeling. … such a big weight off my shoulders,” Briscoe said. “I’ve been telling my wife the last few weeks, I have to win and so to come here and do, it is a great day.”
The other 10 drivers who have won this season are William Byron, Kyle Larson, Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell, Ryan Blaney, Ross Chastain, Joey Logano, Austin Cindric, Josh Berry and Shane van Gisbergen.
Drivers currently on the good side of the cutoff line based on points are Chase Elliott, Tyler Reddick, Chris Buescher and Bubba Wallace.
With nine races remaining to set the Playoff field, Hendrick’s Alex Bowman sits in that 16th-place position, 20-points ahead of Ryan Preece for that final points-only transfer position.
• Austin Cindric finished 10th at Pocono.
“Yeah, really solid effort and honestly, a much needed blue-collar day. We’ve had a lot of speed over the last couple months,” Cindric said. “We just haven’t been able to put it all together and have a solid afternoon. I’m proud of the effort by everybody. Brian [Wilson] did a great job on strategy. I felt like I was able to capitalize on some important restarts and make some passes and get in position there. I think we’re maybe even a little better than that. But all in all, I can’t be too upset with the day – good points day.”
All three Team Penske cars finished in the top 10. Ryan Blaney was third and Joey Logano eighth.
• John Hunter Nemechek earned his sixth top-10 finish of the season for Legacy Motor Club. The finish came after he qualified fourth.
“Both cars had speed this weekend right off the truck and qualified really well. It was my best qualifying effort in the Cup Series and we raced well also,” Nemechek said. “I’m proud of everything they’ve put in at Legacy Motor Club – all the men and women with all the effort they’ve been putting in. Looking forward to continuing to come to the race track when you have the speed. Just a testament to this 42 team.”
• Chase Elliott remains winless on the season, but his fifth-place finish on Sunday was his fifth top-five finish and his ninth top-10 result aboard the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
“We were just really loose in (turn) three. I felt like I could pace pretty good through turns one and two, but I just could not get turn three right all day,” Elliott said. “Certainly as the run went on, it became more challenging for me and I started making more and more mistakes over there. I thought Denny (Hamlin) and Ryan (Blaney) could do a better job of kind of stalking the person in front of them to get themselves opportunities. I was just a little bit too far back and I think it was mainly because of that. But overall, happy to get a fifth-place finish for this No. 9 NAPA Chevy team.”
• Kyle Larson finished seventh in the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
“It was an up-and-down day. It was really hard to pass,” Larson said. “It was a good fight for the No. 5 HendrickCars.com Chevy team to get a seventh-place finish. I just hope we don’t carry what we had the last few weeks into the rest of the season. Prior to the last few weeks, we’ve been really fast. It’s just been a rough stretch, but we’ll continue to go to work.”
• Michael McDowell fell to 21st in the standings after a brake failure relegated him to a 35th-place finish at Pocono. Winning at the forefront of the Spire Motorsports driver’s mind with nine races to go before the playoffs.
“I’ve been telling you guys all year that I’m not planning on pointing my way in,” McDowell said. “I’m planning on winning a race because that’s the way I see us getting into the playoffs. You’re going to have weekends like this where you have issues, you get taken out or you have something happen. You can’t plan on pointing your way in, especially this early on because there’s still a lot of opportunities for guys below the cutline to win, as we saw last weekend.
“When you have places like Atlanta, Chicago, Sonoma, Daytona, you’ve got a lot of tracks that it could open it up for a new winner, like we saw with Harrison Burton last year. That last few years, there’s been a few surprise winners.”
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