1. Playoffs or Not, Kyle Busch Could Make Things Very Exciting
If you want to know what a shot in the arm is, look no further than how things went for Kyle Busch on Monday (Aug. 19) at Michigan International Speedway.
His fourth-place finish was his best result since in May at Dover, but just his second top five since being part of the thrilling three-wide finish near the beginning of the season in Atlanta Motor Speedway.
What’s more is that the No. 8 came away with not just a stage win: His 24 laps led at Michigan were the third-most for Busch this season.
If the playoffs were set right now, Busch would be on the outside looking in.
But if you go back to a week ago after Richmond Raceway, there was a bigger picture of what that day meant for Richard Childress Racing. Beyond all of the talk about how Austin Dillon won and the way he did it, there is this: RCR all of a sudden is a group that knows it can show up and put a race together and run near the front, and it has done that the last two races.
With confidence like that, it’s hard to count Busch out the next two races with a postseason spot on the line.
2. Start Times Need More Give & Take
Putting a schedule of events together in motorsports is not easy.
As the stage gets larger, it’s even more difficult as the key parties with different agendas increase.
Many of us likely grew up racing home from church on Sunday in time for a 1 p.m. race broadcast. Those times are no longer with us, and TV networks cannot be blamed if they prefer mid-afternoon broadcast windows.
But as Sunday afternoon illustrated, a start time in the middle of the afternoon at a track with no lights to illuminate the race surface is lunacy. That’s not to say each track needs lights. It’d be hard to blame track owners for not wanting to put millions of dollars in to have lights for just one or two weekends per year.
But when you start a race later, you lose flexibility.
Between the TV networks, tracks and NASCAR, more give and take when it comes to start times needs to take place in order to set tracks like Michigan up for success.
3. Brewing Chemistry Problems for Ford Teams?
At the end of the day, you need one key element to help your chances of winning at restrictor-plate tracks. That would be teamwork.
That’s likely going to be top of mind heading to this weekend’s next-to-last regular season race at Daytona International Speedway. The better a…
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