BRISTOL, Tenn. — Before the NASCAR Xfinity Series race on Friday night, 18 drivers were still eligible to compete for a championship while 16 Cup Series drivers came into the weekend knowing that four would face playoff elimination in the Bristol Night Race on Saturday evening.
When the checkered flag waved for Chris Buescher and RFK Racing around 11 p.m. after 500 laps on the concrete half-mile on Saturday, 12 drivers from each series came away still alive in the title hunt.
Buescher isn’t eligible for the championship, but his win doesn’t come without meaning. It is the maiden victory for RFK Racing, now partially owned by Brad Keselowski.
Keselowski’s first season as a Cup team co-owner has been rough. He entered Bristol 27th in points without even a single stage win, never mind a race win. But he stayed out of the pits during an early caution and remained up front most of the night. He led 109 laps, passed Kyle Larson for the lead at one point, but ended up an undeserving 13th after suffering a blown right front tire with about 85 laps to go.
Although he would have liked the win as a driver, he’ll happily settle for a victory as an owner.
“It’s like getting kicked in the balls and then winning the lottery,” Keselowski said.
Buescher is one of NASCAR’s most underrated drivers. He won the 2015 Xfinity championship and infamously won the fog-shortened Pocono race in 2016 with Front Row Motorsports to give the team its first-ever taste of the NASCAR postseason.
Roush Fenway Racing has not been the NASCAR juggernaut team it was in the 2000s throughout the last decade. Matt Kenseth, Carl Edwards, and Greg Biffle all left the squad within four years apart, and the Ford organization eventually downsized to two cars for Trevor Bayne and Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
Stenhouse brought the No. 17 to victory twice in 2017, but there wasn’t much else for RFR to celebrate throughout the late 2010s. When Keselowski announced that he would take over the No. 6 car from Ryan Newman, it also meant he’d join John Henry and Jack Roush as an owner. Although Season No. 1 at RFK has been underwhelming until this point, Buescher’s surprise triumph made everything worth it.
“I was thinking for a while there I was going to be in here wearing both hats,” Keselowski said, alluding to his night as a driver and owner. “This is the race that champions win. He has grown so much this year, and I think he has shown that he can be just that. A lot to be proud of today. … I kind of felt like he was a free agent gem and that he wasn’t being scouted properly.”
He may be right about Buescher. When Keselowski took his ownership role, he asked Roush Fenway president Steve Newmark about the length of Buescher’s contract, and Newmark wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad question. Did Keselowski think the 2015 Xfinity champion had potential, or did RFK need to look for someone better?
He believed in Buescher, just as Jack Roush did early in his career.
“This is big to get RFK their first win, and to get to talk to Jack and Brad and have our owners excited and pumped up to get back in Victory Lane is a great feeling, and hopefully, it’s the first of many,” Buescher said. “I feel like we’ve taken some big steps, so it’s special to get here.
“I appreciate Jack and everything he’s done for my career through the years and giving me a chance very early on and all the people back then … It’s all come to this. This one is a little more special than the first one even, so it’s pretty big.”
Chase’s case for a condensed season
It’s September. Do you know what it means? Yes, the NASCAR Playoffs are well underway, but another popular Sunday sport is taking over television screens across America.
The NFL season began this month and runs through February. If you’re a fan of both NASCAR and football, you virtually have something to watch from your couch every Sunday year-round. The Super Bowl transpires a week or two before the Daytona 500, and then it’s NASCAR season through the second week of November.
The problem is that the NFL’s TV ratings are exponentially higher than NASCAR’s. Take the Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Dallas Cowboys Sunday Night Football game on NBC last weekend and compare it to NASCAR’s Southern 500, which occurred the weekend before.
The Bucs vs. Cowboys game averaged about 23.3 million viewers. NASCAR’s playoff opener at Darlington Raceway garnered about 2.61 million viewers on USA Network. You don’t need to be a mathematician to have an opinion on these numbers.
Chase Elliott, NASCAR’s most popular driver, was vocal about the NASCAR calendar when he spoke to the press on Friday. Elliott is notorious for not always speaking about what is on his mind — his post-race interview at Watkins Glen where he congratulated Kyle Larson is a prime example — but he shared honesty about what he thinks NASCAR should do with the back half of its schedule.
“That’s not a battle we’re ever going to win,” he said regarding NASCAR going head-to-head with the NFL for TV ratings on autumn Sunday afternoons. “I’m a firm believer that less is more, in the sense of the timing of a schedule and when we could end our season to make the most for TV ratings and things of that nature. We could do better, personally.”
Elliott acknowledges that scheduling is out of his control, and he probably wouldn’t have been discussing the subject if he weren’t asked about the 2023 schedule that came out earlier this week. But he obviously wants NASCAR to be as successful as possible, and in his mind, that means not trying to battle the NFL for viewership.
He doesn’t think the number of races per year doesn’t have to change. NASCAR can still have 36 races, so perhaps the industry could reconsider doubleheader weekends or midweek races despite poor ratings in 2020. Some fans enjoy football and NASCAR, after all. Elliott himself is an avid fan of the Georgia Bulldogs college football team, and the Atlanta Braves, who look poised for another postseason appearance next month.
“Thirty-six … 45 … 50 – I don’t think it matters how many races we have,” he said. “But I don’t see any reason for competing against NFL football when that starts.”
A personal note
If you’re reading this column, you probably know me personally. Excluding the Daytona 500 earlier this year, this was the first time I have covered a NASCAR race on the east side of the Mississippi River since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have since relocated to Arizona and will continue to cover as many races on the West Coast, but I don’t get to as many races as I used to. And this was my first time at Bristol Motor Speedway, which absolutely didn’t disappoint.
There are several people I chatted with this weekend that I haven’t seen since 2019. Among them are Frontstretch.com’s Michael Massie (thank you for the airport ride again, Michael!), NASCAR superfan Kevin Young, and reporter Jacob Seelman. I also met a longtime Twitter follower and friend Pat Richardson for the first time on Thursday during the ARCA race.
NASCAR’s Twitter community can be toxic and borderline certifiable at times. But there are friendships I have made over the last few years that have been sustained through interactions on social media. For that, I am thankful.
Seelman covered a race for the first time in 14 months this weekend and wrote a column for Kickin’ The Tires about the importance of mental health. He spoke to vocal advocates of the subject, including Cody Ware and Sam Mayer, about it, and it is worth the ten or so minutes to read.
The reason I bring this up is because the people and lives in this industry matter a great deal to me. Sure, every now and then, I’ll experience some hostility on Twitter about some dumb opinion I have, or maybe a PR rep is mad about something I said. Still, NASCAR’s community is tight, and frankly, we spend a lot of time together — 38 weekends per year, to be exact. So if you don’t like everyone right away, you may learn to do so eventually.
What’s next?
The Round of 12 will begin for both NASCAR’s Cup and Xfinity Series next weekend at Texas Motor Speedway. Elliott enters the Cup champion as the No. 1 seed, while Bristol winner Noah Gragson sits atop the Xfinity standings.
The Xfinity playoffs include the independent teams of Jeremy Clements Racing and RSS Racing. Ryan Sieg’s team will be the No. 12 playoff seed and beat Richard Childress Racing’s Sheldon Creed and Kaulig Racing’s Landon Cassill to accomplish the feat.
After Jeremy Clements won his Daytona appeal this week, he knew he’d be in the playoffs.
— John Haverlin (@JohnHaverlin) September 17, 2022
But going up against Cup-affiliated teams, can he make the Round of 8? With Talladega and the Roval in the opening playoff round, he says anything is possible.#nascarplayoffs pic.twitter.com/L6J4R9CxOK
Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick, Austin Dillon, and Tyler Reddick were eliminated from the Cup playoffs. Busch suffered his second engine failure in three weeks. The last time Busch had two engine blow-ups in the same season was in 2013. Meanwhile, RCR’s Dillon and Reddick were involved in crashes on Saturday, and Harvick had a pit snafu that relegated him to 10th after having a top-three car most of the night.
Busch’s early playoff exit was shocking. He’s become one of the greatest Bristol drivers throughout his career and was certainly capable of a top-five finish. Still, an inexplicable engine catastrophe ended his chances at a third Cup Series title with Joe Gibbs Racing.
“I don’t even know what to say. I’m flabbergasted,” Busch said. “I just feel so bad for my guys. They don’t deserve to be in this spot. They work too hard. We are too good of a group to be this low–down on the bottom, fighting for our lives just to make it through.
“I really feel bad for all of Rowdy Nation, everybody at M&M’s, Interstate Batteries, Rowdy Energy, all of the partners that get us going every week. This is not our normal.”
Busch will move to RCR next year, as announced earlier this week. It seemed like he would finish his career with JGR, but after 15 years together, a contract renewal couldn’t be reached, and he’ll have a fresh start in RCR’s No. 8 car in 2023.
Busch wasn’t willing to stick around after his early exit on Saturday night. There were situations that could have occurred that would have allowed Busch to advance to the next playoff round, but obviously, he didn’t see any value in stressing over something he couldn’t control.
“If I get done with my media obligations, and NASCAR releases me, I’m going to the house,” Busch said when asked about tracking the live points standings. “I’ve got kids at home.”
