SO SAD:NASCAR Community React as Bubba Wallace Breaks Silence After Pleading Guilty for Confronting…….Read More 
SO SAD:NASCAR Community React as Bubba Wallace Breaks Silence After Pleading Guilty for Confronting…….Read More
Nor am I saying that the leaders of today’s Cup standings are the demigods of 1992, when Alan Kulwicki drove his Ford Thunderbird to a championship by outsmarting Bill Elliott and outlasting Davey Allison and Harry Gant.
This on a grid that also included Mark Martin, Dale Earnhardt, Rusty Wallace, Terry Labonte, Darrell Waltrip and a paddock loaded top heavy with future NASCAR Hall of Famers.
In more recent seasons, I think of 2011. A year with 18 different race winners. That’s when Tony Stewart won the title in a tiebreaker over just-inducted Hall member Carl Edwards. The rare season when Jimmie Johnson didn’t hoist the Cup included the heavyweight likes of Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and the Busch brothers. A traffic jam of talent so thick that David Ragan and Regan Smith both won races but still couldn’t crack the top 20 in points.
Those were all amazing seasons powered by amazing wheelmen, but let’s not commit the sin of allowing the nostalgia of the rearview mirror to cloud our vision and appreciation for what we are witnessing in this 4K UHD present day.
The argument for today’s roster as one of the most talented we’ve ever seen is about depth.
When Berry — the guy who not so long ago was running sim races before he was plucked out of the digital ether by Dale Jr. and dropped into the real-life short track world — pulled his No. 21 Ford into Vegas Victory Lane, the 34-year-old Tennessean was the 19th different race winner in the past 41 Cup Series races. And he did it by coming out on top of a field of 36 racers and becoming the 25th of them to win at least one Cup Series race. Yes, 25!
In NASCAR’s modern era, since 1972 when the Cup Series cut its schedule to 30-something races and fully shifted toward asphalt speedways, there have been only 14 seasons with 15 or more winners.
Four of those years came in the past four seasons. After five races this year we already have three, even after Christopher Bell gobbled up three wins in a row.
Now, I’m not naïve. I know what this Next Gen car is, and I know that it was specifically designed with parity in mind, as are in-race and in-season rules that didn’t exist in any of those other seasons I already mentioned.
All of that has undoubtedly opened doors for teams and drivers that in another era would have been left behind in a literal cloud of brake dust.
However, before anyone starts touting the glory days of the second half of this century’s first decade, including that benchmark 2011 season previously mentioned, make sure to remember that was the age of the Car of Tomorrow, a shoebox with wings that had also been conjured up as a playing-field leveler.
But the Obi-Wan Kenobi-like voice that I keep hearing as I sort through all of that is really more of chorus.
Words first spoken to me by then-teenager Austin Dillon, racing in the NASCAR Truck Series for his grandfather, Richard Childress, and catching all sorts of flak from the Raise Hell Praise Dale crowd for running the slanted No. 3 made famous by “The Intimidator.”
“Have I had opportunities because of my Pop-Pop? Yes. Are the rules different now than they were back in the day? Yes. But you know what? When the green flag drops, my granddad and those rules don’t drive the race car. I do.”
Since that conversation, he’s won seven Truck races and also added nine Xfinity wins and five Cup victories, including a Daytona 500 title.
These days, he’s not winning much of anything and is currently mired back in 32nd in the rankings with nary a top-10 finish.
And Dillon’s words have been repeated to me so many times by so many racers.
“Everything out there is working against you, whether it’s the car or changes in the car or the racetrack and changes to the racetrack or the points and changes to the points, or just all those guys out there with you who are working to beat your ass,” Earnhardt Jr. said to me late in his career.
beat Bowman by 1.205 seconds for his second career Cup Series win at Homestead, and his second victory of the weekend.
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Larson fell one race short of sweeping the triple-header weekend. He won the Craftsman Truck race on Friday and finished fourth in the Xfinity Series on Saturday despite leading 132 of 201 laps. He was hoping to join Kyle Busch as the only drivers to sweep a triple-header weekend — Busch did it at Bristol Motor Speedway in 2010 and 2017. Larson will take another shot at a sweep in Bristol next month.
He said he was motivated by Saturday’s result, when a late caution essentially cost him a race he had dominated. It was an all-to-familiar feeling of disappointment at Homestead despite Larson historically driving very well there.
“Proud of myself. Proud of the team. Just a lot of gritty hard work there today,” Larson said. “Super pumped. One of the coolest wins I think in my Cup career just because of all the heartbreak I’ve had here, the heartbreak yesterday. To just keep my head down and keep digging feels really good.”
He was far from dominant on Sunday. Larson led just 19 of 267 laps, had to climb from 14th-place starting position and overcame pit road mishaps and bad restarts to pull off the win – his first victory of the season and first in the Cup Series at Homestead since 2022.
“Given past history, I just wanted to take the green flag and kick everybody’s ass today,” Larson said. “I wanted to get to the lead early and just dominate like I was yesterday. Then the green flag flew, and it was like the opposite. I was going backwards and getting [mad] in the helmet.
“After 10 laps or so, I forgot about the wanting to kick everybody’s ass all race long. It was like, ‘All right, let’s try to and work hard at this and get a win.'”
Bowman, who was Saturday’s pole winner, finished second in the No. 48 Chevrolet. Bubba Wallace was third for 23XI Racing after leading 56 laps — the most laps he’s led in a race since September 2023. Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Chase Briscoe and Denny Hamlin rounded out the top five.
Ryan Blaney was running third when his engine blew up on Lap 207, causing a thick cloud of smoke to cover the track and a lengthy cleanup.
It had been a strong race for Blaney before then. He led 124 laps and won Stage 1 after starting sixth. It was the second time in three races that Blaney did not finish a race because of an engine failure with his No. 12 Team Penske Ford.
“It just stinks,” Blaney said. “Led a lot of laps. Lost a little bit of track position there with some stuff on pit road but got back to third. And it was a great race between me, Bubba and Larson. … It was going to be a heck of a battle the last 60 laps or so but just didn’t really work out for us. We’ll keep our head up.
“It’s one of those things where it’s not really going our way right now, but the good news is we’re bringing fast cars.”
