It’s a beautiful day in the Dover neighborhood with bright blue skies. I’m not sure of the temperature, but it looks lovely. Brian Dawkins is the honorary grand marshal and is getting his jersey retired by the Philadelphia Eagles this evening. He seems to be having a good time and Martin Truex Jr is going to the game with him tonight and is wearing an Eagle’s helmet. This is being called his home track – there are a couple that get this nickname, but it appears this one if the one he considers his home track.
Denny won the pole. Jimmie starts 11th. Right now the talking heads are viewing the Chase as a two-man race between Jimmie and Denny. Of course, after the first week, they were viewing the Chase as a three-man race between Denny, Bradley K and Jimmie. Though they kept Smoke and Kenseth in the conversation and held out hope for Jeff Gordon. Since the talking heads all just basically repeat what each other says, I guess its not important.
It’s 71 degrees as the pace laps get underway. Lots of empty seats in the stands. 35 mph is pit road speed. Jimmie is having trouble with the set up for pit road speed as they do the pace lights. Chad tells him to go off his lights and he should be fine.
During the week it was announced that Kurt Busch would drive the 78 Furniture Row Chevy and will begin to drive it in Charlotte. So Regan Smith is out and apparently he didn’t know he was going to be out, and certainly not before next year. Jimmie says the 5 car is spewing fuel all over the track. Wonder what’s going on with that and if it will affect the start of the race.
The race goes green for 60 laps as cars begin to head in for their first green flag pit stops. Denny Hamlin led the first 34 laps and was overtaken by Kyle Busch. Caution is out for debris on turn 3 – JJ Yeley’s tire blew out and tore off the right front fender which is the debris in turn 3. Chad is warning Jimmie about running on the apron to avoid running out of gas and warns him he might have to maneuver to get around the 36. Quite a few cars are running on the apron to avoid running out of fuel. The trajectory of some of the debris is causing pit road to remain closed.
KyBu won the race off pit road. Several cars had already come in for green flag pit stops and were caught out on this caution. All of them opted for a wave-around.
They wave off the restart for some debris caught in the fence. 99 is the only car that gets back on the lead lap after taking the wave-around because the rest were two laps down when the caution came out (like Smoke & Logano). As a result there are currently only 8 cars on the lead lap and 7 of the Chase drivers are one lap down.
On lap 87 Jr just bumped Newman out of the way to get around him. Kahne also passed Newman putting a buffer between them.
Lap 178 caution for debris in turn 3. Carl Edwards in the 99 gets the free pass. Hamlin takes two tires and comes out of the pits first. On the restart KyBu takes the lead easily. The one lap down cars all came in for tires on this caution instead of taking the wave-around.
On lap 194 Biffle comes in with a front tire problem. He radioed in that he had to come in now. After the stop his radio transmissions could easily be confused with Kurt Busch’s radio chatter.
Caution is out around lap 242 for debris in turn 3 again.
Caution out around lap 302 – Kenseth’s car broke – he thinks it might have been a track bar issue. According to Bestwick it looks a lot like what happened to Justin Allgaier in the Nationwide race yesterday. Jimmie wins the race off pit road. Chad immediately tells him to save fuel. They are 8 laps shy right now so he’s advised to save it when he can.
Denny thinks the throttle is sticking a little bit and complained about them losing a spot on pit road having the number one pit stall. Darien said they had a problem on the rear but he thinks they will have another shot to make it up so they are planning on another pit stop before the end.
On the restart Kenseth’s car breaks and he hits the wall. He headed straight to the garage once he got off the wall.
Gas strategy resulted in a fourth place finish for Jimmie and a win for Bradley K.