As a big fan of NASCAR, I knew there will be a 3+ month break after this weekend that seems like forever but still I was really excited about this. The truck race was without much drama: Christopher Bell wasn't really challenged during the whole race. The Xfinity race was more competitive: William Byron's car was strong during most of the race but Elliot Sadler was equally if not stronger at various times during the race too. (Daniel Hemric's car had a failure that took him out of the equation and Justin Allgaier's car couldn't find speed, even with the help of 7-time championship winning crew chief, Chad Knaus, in his pit) Sadler was leading the final stage of the race and had a good chance to win the championship. However, he was held up by Ryan Preece, who could have just let Sadler go. And William Byron seized the opportunity to use Preece as a "pick" and passed them both. That was THE championship winning move. Sadler bumped into Preece as a desperation move and hit the wall which made it even less possible for him to catch up to Byron. Sadler was really mad at Preece at the end of the race. After all, looking at the history of the series, this year might have been the closest one where an "old dude" (Sadler was a full time driver at the top level for about 10 years before moving "back down" to this series) win it all. When I look at the list of champs starting from 2001, 6 of them moved on and won championships at the next level. For some reason this series favor young guns.
The cup series championship featured even more drama: all 4 drivers had their moments that look promising for them to win it all. Keselowski's car was the weakest among them (which kinda proved his point that Toyota had an unfair advantage over other manufacturers.) I kinda rooted for Martin Truex Jr who was the only one among the final 4 who has not won a championship yet but was the winningest driver this season (and he has shown huge improvements in the past few years) and have been dominant on 1.5 mile race track like this one in Miami. It seems that he has lost his magic here though. Busch's car has been the strongest, especially in long runs. In situation like this, it's only natural that Brad K's team would play the strategy game by going off sequence, i.e, pit early and try to gain ground with new tires while hoping to get lucky. Harvick and Truex's team followed suit but Kyle Busch's team decided to stay out and pit normally, which would have been the winning strategy if there was no more cautions since his 3 competitors all need to pit one more time then him. However, luck was not on his side. The caution was brought out by none other than his older brother Kurt! Talk about sibling rivalry! So Kyle's car ended up behind Truex's and like Sadler he was held up by another driver with nothing to win: Joey Logano (who was certainly no friend of Busch) but unlike Sadler his car was strong enough to eventually pass Logano but he admitted later he used up his car doing that and was not able to pass Truex even though he got really close.
The other "winner" that I must mention is this year's brand new point system! I think it did make the races prior to the championships more competitive.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
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