Perhaps all is not perfect when one has four drivers chasing the NASCAR championship. In Sunday’s Sprint Cup race at Martinsville Speedway, a trio of Joe Gibbs Racing drivers lined up behind leader Jimmie Johnson.
It appears all was not in harmony between them, though, as they politely jostled for position without making the contact often necessary to get past a car on this paperclip track. So in the end, they watched as Brad Keselowski slipped by and took second, leaving the Gibbs teammates finishing third, fourth and fifth.
Matt Kenseth couldn't cleanly get past Denny Hamlin while Kyle Busch couldn't move around Kenseth. So they rode along, unable to make a move on Johnson as he pulled away.
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And while that is good for the big picture in terms of advancing to the next round of the Chase, could one of the trio have actually beaten Johnson? Did Hamlin, who overcame both a speeding penalty on pit road and an earlier contact with Johnson, hold up his teammates?
Kyle Busch, who finished fifth, obviously felt that he could have gotten more out of the race. Could he have made a run for the win? He wasn’t sure.
Asked about the way the JGR drivers were racing each other, he appeared to be frustrated with the way things went.
“You can’t wreck each other and that’s all there is to it, I guess,” he said. “We worked so good together we gave (Jimmie Johnson) the win today; that’s how good JGR is.
“… We were kind of held up there and we couldn’t pass and every time I did try to make moves or try to pass I got cut off, so I couldn’t drive through them but we came home with a top-five … I don’t know if we could have got up there and caught the 48 with as long as we got held up behind all that stuff but we had a better car than fifth-place today … It’s frustrating to not be higher up.”
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Working together has worked to get the JGR teams to this point. While Carl Edwards suffered a setback and fell deep in the field on Sunday, the rest are still in contention.
Hamlin was asked after the race if he had talked with Busch and simply shook his head that he had not. Pressed on whether Busch or Kenseth might have had the faster car in the closing laps, he simply said that he had to race for every position at this point.
“When we're racing for third or something like that, we got to do everything we can to get every position,” he said. “Really for us, we had a better car in the long run. Really those guys pressured me pretty good I thought for the first 40 to 50 laps of the run, then I thought we separated ourselves fairly well.
“So I may have held those guys up for a little bit of that final run, but definitely don't think I was holding anyone up at the end, for sure.”
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With Johnson's win, only three of the four JGR cars can advance into the final round of the Chase.
“That's the tough part of it, for sure,” Hamlin said. “We're in a team business, but we're also in a business to win for our sponsors and ourselves. I think at the end, you have to do what's best for yourself. We made deals about restarts and things like that. Obviously I think I got two taps or something like that from (Kenseth). …
“But, you know, it's just part of it. We're all frustrated. We had probably the first-, second-, third-fastest cars throughout the day, then we end up three, four, five. It's frustrating for all of us.”