In a race where ‘you’ve got to be perfect,’ miscues costly in shot for Cup Series title
Kevin Harvick took a gamble by holding off on his final pit stop Sunday. Martin Truex Jr and Denny Hamlin had their problems Sunday arise from pit road.
One bad judgment call. One miscalculation. One mistake proved to be the difference.
It gave Kyle Busch a runaway victory over his Championship 4 competitors for the NASCAR Cup Series title at Homestead-Miami Speedway’s Ford EcoBoost 400.
Truex finished a distant second, nearly four-and-a-half seconds behind Busch. Harvick (fourth) and Hamlin (10th) were 14 and 30 seconds behind first place, respectively.
“You’ve got to be perfect,” Truex said.
And as far as Sunday went, Busch was the only driver in contention for the title who ran the race without a noticeable hiccup.
‘Too much of a gap’
Truex’s was the most visible. After being the clear-cut leader 120 laps into the race, his pit crew accidentally put tires on the wrong side of the car — an error he can’t remember happening before.
He had to circle back to pit road a lap later, putting him a lap behind.
“It doesn’t drive good with the left ones on the right, I can tell you that,” Truex said. “Very tight.”
He worked his way back toward the front but had trouble weaving past Joey Logano and Erik Jones at the start of the third stage.
“I lost a bunch of ground on that run because of getting tight in traffic and then was just too far back to make anything happen on that last run,” Truex said. “Ultimately, it came down to track position. I felt like if I was out front and could have been out front and controlled the race, I could have drove away from them. At the end, we were quicker. It was just too much of a gap.”
An aggressive move
Hamlin was on the outside looking in for a majority of the 267-lap race.
But any chance of winning came undone with about 45 laps left when his No. 11 Toyota began to overheat.
The culprit: A heavy dose of tape on the car’s grille.
“We got a little aggressive there and it cost us, but he’s been really aggressive and won us races, too,” Hamlin said. “He’s going for it. He saw an opportunity there to add some speed to the car. It just didn’t work out.”
Hoping for a caution
Harvick saw an opening after Truex and Busch respectively made pit stops on Laps 209 and 210.
His hope: A caution flag would fly, which would give him a free chance to pit and attempt to win a shootout over the final few rides around the one-and-a-half mile track.
The caution never came, Harvick ultimately conceded to a pit stop on Lap 224 and he had no chance to make up ground on Busch over the final 40-plus laps.
“We just needed to do something different,” Harvick said. “They were just so much better than us in the long runs that we knew our best chance was to have a caution there. We never got one.”
Harvick was the race’s frontrunner early and showed up in spots. He jumped into the lead after the first lap and held onto the top spot for the first 20 laps and had a strong run over the final 15 laps of Stage 2 coming out of a caution.
But he struggled to keep pace on long runs.
“I could hold them off for 15 or 20 laps right there and this race has come down to that every year,” Harvick said. “We kind of played toward that, but they were better than us on the long run.”
.JPG)