Martin Truex Jr. captures first Chase race at Chicagoland
Martin Truex Jr. won the first race of the 2016 Chase to the Sprint Cup at Chicagoland Speedway on Sunday, earning a spot in the next round of NASCAR's playoffs in the process.
It wasn't easy. But then, these races never are.
Chase Elliott was in the lead and seemed poised to earn his first career Sprint Cup win -- one that would have guaranteed him advancement into the next round of the Chase playoffs instead of Truex.
Then Michael McDowell blew a right-front tire with five laps to go, bringing out a caution and setting up a green-white-checkered overtime finish.
When most of the leaders all elected to come in to pit, Truex beat Elliott off pit road by the slimmest of margins after a crisp 12.2-second stop. Elliott's No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team got him off pit road in 12.7 seconds, fumbling one of the tires just enough to give the edge to Truex's crew.
That enabled Truex to start in fourth on the ensuing restart behind the cars of three drivers who elected not to pit: Ryan Blaney, Kasey Kahne and Carl Edwards. They were on older tires, however, and Truex made quick work of passing them all on the high side to go to Victory Lane.
"What can I say? This is how we want to start off (the Chase)," Truex said. "This feels awesome."
Joey Logano ended up second, Elliott finished third, Blaney fourth and Brad Keselowski fifth. That puts Elliott, along with Team Penske teammates Logano and Keselowski, in good shape in the Chase heading into Race 2 next weekend at New Hampshire.
"I couldn't be more proud of the team and the way we executed and attacked today," Logano said. "We will take this momentum and run with it the next nine weeks."
Keselowski added: "It wa a solid day for us, nothing flashy. We ended up with a decent finish."
Other Chasers weren't so fortunate.
Jimmie Johnson dominated the first two-thirds of the race, leading 118 of the first 183 laps before his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet began slowing and Elliott, his HMS teammate, passed him for the lead.
"The thing is acting weird when I let off the gas," Johnson reported on the team radio. "It, like, goes straight."
That is not good when you must turn left every 7.5 seconds or so, as usually is the case for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series drivers at the 1.5-mile Chicagoland Speedway.
Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus eventually determined it the car was reacting oddly to a bad set of tires. Once he pitted and got a new set on the No. 48 car, Johnson quickly moved up to second again.
But after he pitted on Lap 233, Johnson was penalized for speeding when exiting pit road. It was the type of penalty Johnson and his team rarely made while racking up six previous championships -- but this season has been pockmarked by those kinds of costly errors.
That left the lead to Elliott.
But he was being stalked by Truex, whose No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Toyota was one of the fastest in the field all day.
Truex actually was leading the race earlier, when a right-front tire came apart on Lap 68 and he hustled to pit road to minimize the damage. The unscheduled green-flag stop dropped him back in the field, but it wasn't the disaster it could have been and, from there, he methodically worked his way back to the front.
Asked after the race what he thought when the adversity struck on Lap 68, Truex said: "Don't give up, just keep digging -- and there was only one way to go with that tonight. One one hand I thought the bad luck was going to bite us and on the other, we had a lot of time to battle back.
"We're lucky it happened early and we were able to have an awesome race car all day long."
Two of the 12 drivers in the Chase faced obstacles right out of the gate, as both Kyle Larson and Kevin Harvick were sent to the rear of the field -- Larson for a transmission change in his No. 42 Chip Ganassi Chevy and Harvick for an unapproved body mofdification to his No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevy.
Both Larson and Harvick fought their way back into the top 10 at times, but eventually Larson finished 18th and Harvick 20th. That left them at the bottom of the Chase grid after the opening playoff race, along with Chris Buescher, who finished 28th.
Johnson ended up finishing 12th, with four other Chase drivers ahead of him in Denny Hamlin (sixth), Kyle Busch (eighth), Matt Kenseth (ninth) and Jamie McMurray (11th).
The remainder of the 16-driver Chase field stacked right up behind Johnson, including Kurt Busch (13th), Austin Dillon (14th), Edwards (15th) and Tony Stewart (16th).
