Watkins Glen International was supposed to represent the final wildcard track before the regular season concludes. A venue where a Cinderella from a mid-pack team or a veteran looking to conjure some magic from yesteryear could score a win and lock themselves into the Chase for the Sprint Cup alongside NASCAR’s heavy hitters.
NASCAR Watkins Glen 2015 recap: Lack of wins, points puts Kasey Kahne on Chase bubble
With four races left in NASCAR’s regular season some big names need a win if they want to make the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
Except no surprising victor emerged Sunday; instead a familiar face stood in Victory Lane when the Cheez-It 355 concluded. Team Penske’s Joey Logano, the Daytona 500 winner and 2014 championship finalist, celebrated his first road course win.
AJ Allmendinger’s bid for a repeat win ended when his No. 47 car lost power just past halfway of the 90-lap race. And the hopes Tony Stewart held of turning around a woebegone season never came to fruition due to a rear gear failure that relegated him to a last-place finish.
That no first-time winner this season emerged Sunday didn’t, however, preclude a jostling among those still trying to qualify for NASCAR’s playoffs.
Eleven races into a comeback from devastating leg injuries that sidelined him the opening 11 races of the year, Kyle Busch finished second by conserving fuel over the final laps. That moved him to 30th in the standings -- the cutoff to gain Chase eligibility. He is six points ahead of 31st-ranked Cole Whitt with four regular season races remaining.
“We knew we would be,” Busch said. “It was just a matter of time. That was probably another reason we didn’t need to run out of gas and have an issue here today.
Busch’s ascension into the 16-driver Chase field leaves five spots available to those without a victory, a number that could diminish further if a new winner breaks through within the next four events. And for drivers winless and on the wrong side of the cutline, they’re now essentially facing must-win scenarios.
Sunday was particularly frustrating for Kasey Kahne, who followed a 43rd-place result the week before with a 42nd at Watkins Glen to drop him 51 points behind Clint Bowyer, who finished sixth, for the 16th position. Kahne’s made the Chase three straight seasons, but a fourth appears unlikely.
”At this rate we’re going to need to win, that’s the only way we’ll go into the Chase, Kahne said. “I don’t know what my deal is. But we’ve got to get a little better. I need to get a little better.”
Said Bowyer: “We never really were able to capitalize on strategy or anything like that. Just never was a big player in the game, but we did what we needed to do.”
If Kahne is in need of succor, all he has to do is reflect back a year. At the same juncture of 2014, the Hendrick Motorsports driver was winless and precariously on the edge of not qualifying for the Chase.
Yet a spirited victory featuring Kahne pulling off a brazen three-wide pass for the lead in the second-to-last regular season race changed his fortunes. And it’s why he could rationalize the current predicament even amidst his torment.
“We had a nice test at Bristol, so I feel that will help us when we get there,” Kahne said. “Hopefully we can run good at Michigan and maybe get a win there -- we’ve won there before and also won there at Bristol before. Maybe one of those tracks -- Darlington and Richmond.
“There are some tracks that we could run really well at.”
A driver expressing borderline despair mixed with fleeting moments of optimism can mean only one thing: NASCAR’s regular season is winding down and the mad scramble to get into the Chase is on.
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