To pep up Chase, NASCAR needs an April-like smashing finish at Richmond

Ray Slover

To pep up Chase, NASCAR needs an April-like smashing finish at Richmond image

Remember this season's first Richmond race? If NASCAR wants to go into the Chase for the Sprint Cup with a hot story to tell, a repeat of April's smashing finish would be stock car racing's answer to a Carolina Reaper.



Saturday night's Federated Auto Parts 400 needs the kind of finish fans would get from a cross between a ghost pepper and a habanero. We're talking serious fire.

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That April race saw Carl Edwards move Kyle Busch as they headed to the finish line. When the checkered flag fell, Edwards had another in the season's tick-tight victories.

Sell that to fans and casual observers. Let them feel the burn of the best racing action NASCAR can produce.

Now, imagine the men at the wheel in Richmond's September answer to April are drivers who are trying to win their way into the Chase.

There's no reason to believe that will happen. After all, the only winless drivers now in Cup competition with a chance to make the Chase are Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne and Clint Bowyer. Newman, Richmond winner in 2003; Kahne, in '05, and Bowyer, in '08 and 2012, all face win-or-else races.

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Bring it on, Kahne told media members this week.

"I've always liked Richmond. I have been able to win here in the past and I look forward to the challenge," Kahne said. "I think you can bring a lot back from the day race (in April), but the bigger thing is the cars have changed since then. Even though it will be the same package, the teams have built better cars. We were really competitive in the first race."

Newman and Kahne are in the two points position outside the Chase. They have little hope of catching the three winless drivers trying to make the 16-driver Chase. Chase Elliott, Austin Dillon and bubble-boy Jamie McMurray hold positions they won't willingly surrender.

Newman at least has a glimmer, given that Chris Buescher must hold a top-30 position after the Richmond race to qualify for the Chase. A bad night for Buescher, and Newman would steal a berth.

There's another matter to consider. Would a driver wreck another to make the Chase? Pole-sitter Denny Hamlin addressed that question this week.

"We all know that this race is win or nothing, so I think that everyone will be a little bit more aggressive," Hamlin said. "Definitely wouldn't intentionally knock a teammate out of the way or anything like that, but would for sure give them all that I have as fair as I could if it came down to it."

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Rubbing is racing, just as Edwards and Busch showed in April. What NASCAR doesn't want is the tomfoolery it saw in 2013's September race, in which Bowyer took racing's equivalent of a dive to help a teammate make the Chase. Having none of that, NASCAR rapped knuckles hard, leading to the demise of Michael Waltrip Racing.

Drivers know what's at stake. They also know Richmond isn't easy, a three-quarter-mile nightmare waiting to happen.

"Richmond is getting a little trickier it seems like just with the asphalt kind of getting older and the way the cars are, and the tire hasn't really changed there in the last few years," Busch said this week. "The consensus at Richmond is just trying to get your car to turn, but also having really good forward bite. You have to be able to get off the corners at Richmond. You have to have good brakes as well and be able to turn the center. All of it correlates.

"Everything you want as a racecar driver, you've got to have most all of it and, if you don't, then you better hope you have more forward bite than the rest of them. That's sort of the equation of Richmond. It's a fun place to race — it's really cool. As a driver, you wish it could widen out and give you more options of being able to run around in different grooves, but it hasn't shown us that the last couple of years."

Someone will find the winning groove. A few bumps would make it that much more exciting.

Ray Slover