For all but a few drivers in Sunday’s NASCAR Nextel Cup LifeLock 400 at Kansas Speedway, it was not a good day to be in The Chase.
It actually started one day earlier for defending series champ Jimmie Johnson, who won the pole on Friday but crashed his car in Saturday’s practice. He had to start the race in a backup car, which meant he had to start at the back of the pack.
But for the other 11 drivers in NASCAR’s manipulated championship “playoff,” Sunday’s race was almost a curse to those in The Chase.
Just 29 laps into the race, Chase driver Kyle Busch was drilled from behind by the man who is going to replace him at Hendrick Motorsports, Dale Earnhardt, Jr.
Busch was incredulous when he watched his crew repair his wrecked Chevrolet before he returned to the track for a 41st-place finish.
“I gave him a lane to try to go on the outside because I knew he would have a run off the corner, but I got run into the back of and spun out down the back straightaway for absolutely no reason,” Busch said. “It was a pretty stupid move on his part. I’m sure these guys he will be working with next year don’t appreciate this because they have a championship they can win this year and he doesn’t.
“I don’t know what he was thinking. He ran me over for no reason whatsoever.”
Busch believes his chance at winning The Chase ended in this race.
“Yeah, right,” said Busch, who won Saturday’s Busch race at Kansas. “Last year we didn’t come back. We got to 10th and ran 10th. Hopefully we can keep going the way we were at the first of the year and get back on track.
“It’s three in, with seven more to go, so we’ll have to make it up somehow.”
Earnhardt, who isn’t in The Chase, took responsibility for the incident.
“We put the No. 5 (Busch) car out,” Earnhardt said. “That was an accident. I want to apologize to his fans, and their team, and Kyle. That was a bad mistake on my part.
“I just run into the back of him. I was screaming as I was going by for him to save it, but he couldn’t gather it up. It was my fault.”
That was just the beginning of many whacky moments for the “Chasers” in this race.
Jeff Burton was sent to the back of the field for pulling the fender out on his Chevrolet during the first red-flag session. That is a no-no in NASCAR’s rulebook. He later had a fuel problem and finished 36th, 11 laps down.
Martin Truex, Jr. and Matt Kenseth were part of a wild five-car crash on the first lap after the race was restarted after a lengthy second red-flag session for rain. Truex finished 38th and Kenseth 35th.
Tony Stewart, who entered the race just two points behind Jeff Gordon, had a damaged fender from that incident, and when the race restarted, the front tire started to smoke from the fender rubbing on the rubber.
Ultimately, that tire blew up in the third turn, triggering a crash when Kurt Busch ran into the back of Stewart’s slowed Chevy, which spun into the path of Carl Edward’s Ford.
Stewart finished 39th and Edwards was 37th, while Busch finished 11th.
And Denny Hamlin can pretty much give up on winning the Cup after he was involved in a crash with Paul Menard and Jamie McMurray. Hamlin was 12th in points entering the race and stays in that position, falling even further behind, trailing by 248 points.
That left Clint Bowyer, who finished second, third-place finisher Jimmie Johnson and fifth-place Jeff Gordon as the only drivers in The Chase who were unscathed in this race.
But even Bowyer could fall into that category after non-Chase driver Greg Biffle appeared to drop off the pace in a race that ended under yellow.
Three cars passed Biffle because they believed he was not maintaining “pace-car speed” heading to the checkered flag, but NASCAR awarded the win to him anyway.