Team Penske drivers giving Joe Gibbs Racing, Hendrick Motorsports a run for their money
By Bob Pockrass
FOX Sports NASCAR Writer
FORT WORTH, Texas — Joe Gibbs Racing has two drivers above the current championship-eligible cutline, with one below. Team Penske has one above and two below.
But if the race Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway showed anything, the Penske drivers could upend a postseason that was expected to be dominated by Hendrick Motorsports and JGR.
Penske drivers outran JGR throughout the race at Texas, with Brad Keselowski finishing fourth and Ryan Blaney sixth. JGR’s lone non-playoff driver, Christopher Bell, was third, while Kyle Busch struggled to finish eighth, and Denny Hamlin struggled even before a couple of incidents relegated him into 11th. A crash relegated Martin Truex Jr. to 25th.
Before the race, Keselowski said that if he can score 110-120 points in the three-race round, he would advance to be among the four championship finalists Nov. 7 at Phoenix. He earned 40 points Sunday but went from 16 points behind the current cutoff entering the round to 15 points down after Texas.
Two races — at Kansas and Martinsville — remain in the round, and three title-eligible spots are available. Hendrick Motorsports driver Kyle Larson, the most dominant driver all season, secured one of the spots by winning Sunday at Texas.
"Clearly we’d rather just win and not have to worry about it," Keselowski said prior to the race. "One of the things about these playoffs — they’re very dynamic.
"Cars that weren’t fast at one time become fast, and vice versa."
The Penske cars were flat-out better than JGR on Sunday, and that is something they should feel good about, even if they weren’t able to touch the top-two Hendrick cars of Larson and William Byron.
"We’ve got our stuff a little bit better," Blaney said. "The Hendrick stuff still looks pretty good, obviously. But we’ve closed the gap a tiny bit to Gibbs and Hendrick.
"But this stuff goes week-to-week. Different tracks, different setups … hopefully we’re more competitive at Kansas."
The thought prior to this round was that Team Penske drivers, especially Keselowski and Joey Logano, would have to overachieve to advance, that they just haven’t matched the Hendrick and JGR teams that won most of the races at intermediate tracks, except for Blaney’s triumphs at Atlanta and Michigan earlier this year.
Logano said prior to the weekend that he thought they were "scratching at top-5s to get there, and that’s not fast enough, so we’ll see what happens … where we are speed-wise."
He didn’t have the speed of his teammates at Texas but still thinks that overall, the team’s performance will be a boost.
"It helps us feel a little more confident," he said. "I think that was probably one of the best 1.5-mile tracks we have had. It has been that way of late, making steady gains.
"It looks like the 5 [of Larson] and 24 [of Byron] are the best of the field, but there are times the 12 [of Blaney] and 2 [of Keselowski] can get up there. We were just fighting track position all day. If we could have gotten track position, I wonder what it would have looked like."
The question is how much to read into Texas? It is quite a different 1.5-mile track than Kansas, as Texas has different banking in Turns 1-2 than Turns 3-4, and NASCAR used a resin to help create traction in a second groove. Kansas is a more traditional 1.5-mile oval and won’t have any of the resin. Busch won there in April.
"We definitely weren’t ourselves today, but I don’t think it has anything to do with next week," Hamlin said. "This racetrack is a little different. We probably learned some lessons today. Next week, hopefully we bring that speed that we had in Vegas."
Seeing themselves trail the Penske drivers and struggle overall on Sunday had the JGR drivers scratching their heads.
"We were off," Busch said. "I don’t know how we missed it, where we missed it. … I don’t know what is going on, but that wasn’t the way to perform on the opening day [of this round]."
Busch said they are going to have "to go back to work." Not the most optimistic after three hours of struggles in a race car, he wasn’t confident that things would be much different at Kansas.
"It’s going to be similar," he said. "It’s not going to be as one-groove-ish, fighting the first lane of that spray. You’re going to be able to widen out and race all over the track. That should be, hopefully, a little better."
This isn’t the time of the season for wondering what went wrong. Penske has all the momentum in trying to earn the final spots to challenge Larson for the championship.
"This was a huge weekend for us," Keselowski said following Texas. "We showed more speed than we showed all year on the 550 [horsepower] tracks. We showed potential to go out there and win these races."
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Thinking out loud
Did NASCAR really have to step in and make sure that the Kevin Harvick-Chase Elliott feud did not impact the championship?
Yes and no.
Harvick’s history shows that he is willing to push the driver code on what is fair when he has something to gain, including earlier this month at Charlotte, when knocking Elliott out of the way could have helped Harvick advance to the playoffs. With Harvick out of the playoffs, however, it didn’t seem likely that he would take another shot at Elliott.
Elliott, for his part, has too much to race for to worry about Harvick. So in that sense, and in the spirit of keeping people wondering, maybe NASCAR should have not intervened. NASCAR created the dramatics of the playoffs, so why douse this fire?
Then again, if something had happened, NASCAR would have caught the blame for not trying to put a stop to it and for having this feud impact the championship and potentially make a mockery of the sport. What NASCAR did was probably the right move.
Social spotlight
Stat of note
The past two Hendrick drivers to make the Championship 4 — Elliott in 2020 and Jimmie Johnson in 2016 — won the title.
They said it
"We get to go race for a championship in a few weeks. This is crazy." – Kyle Larson
Bob Pockrass has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s. He joined FOX Sports in 2019 following stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @bobpockrass. Looking for more NASCAR content? Sign up for the FOX Sports NASCAR Newsletter with Bob Pockrass!
