Who… should you be talking about after the race?
After two weeks of finishing 33rd or worse, Christopher Bell turned things around at Phoenix Raceway to win the Shriner’s Children’s 500. Bell, along with Tyler Reddick, showed early that he had one of the cars to beat, winning the second stage.
Mid-race cautions shuffled Bell to mid-pack with just under 100 to go, but Bell worked his way back to the front, while Reddick and other early frontrunners could not do the same after being trapped in traffic.
Chris Buescher mounted a charge in the closing laps, shaving a couple of seconds off Bell’s lead, but time ran out and Buescher still trailed Bell by 5.465 seconds. It’s Bell’s first win of 2022 and moves him from 21st to 12th in driver points.
And don’t forget Buescher and teammate Brad Keselowski. RFK Racing has had a bit of a shaky start to 2024, but he put it all together in a big way in Phoenix. Buescher’s runner-up finish, his second top 10 of the year, gives him some momentum heading to Bristol, a track where he has a win and a fourth-place finish in the last two races on the track’s concrete surface.
Keselowski grabbed his first top 10 and top five at Phoenix after failing to finish the first two races and finishing 13th a week ago in Las Vegas. RFK had a strong 2023, and despite the stumbles to open 2024, at Phoenix they looked like they’re ready to pick things up where they left off last year.
What… is the big question leaving this race in the rearview?
For the third year in a row, NASCAR rolled into Phoenix with a different rules package, hoping to find something that would make the racing better on the short tracks and flat tracks on the circuit. And while it’s better than the original Next Gen package they ran in 2022, not a lot of gains have been made.
What’s missing? Prior to the Next Gen car, NASCAR also used different engine packages at some tracks — while lower horsepower helped on the intermediate tracks (and still does), the short tracks, flat tracks and road courses put on a better show with more power under the hood.
If more power has the potential to be a major fix, and it’s something that teams could easily adapt to, why won’t NASCAR pull the trigger on something that drivers and fans seem to agree would help the sport?
The reason given was that the lower HP package was key in attracting new manufacturers to the Cup Series. But that hasn’t…
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