Kyle Busch, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Target NASCAR over Oil Spill Cleanup

Kyle Busch and Dale Earnhardt Jr. were not happy with how the “Contender Round” of the Sprint Cup Series’ Chase began over the weekend.

Both believed that remnants of a Justin Allgaier oil spill on lap 182 during the race at Charlotte caused them to strike a wall.

Busch targeted NASCAR, sarcastically saying, “You can’t pass anybody — it’s a single-lane race track and then [a driver] put oil on the top lane [where we] to try to make anything happen and then you put yourself in the fence — so thanks to NASCAR for cleaning that up,” ESPN.com reports.

“I’ve raced this [stuff] for 20 years,” Earnhardt said. “I know what oil and [the absorbent] Speedi Dri is. We hit fluid, flew into the freaking wall hard. That’s not Speedi Dri. There was oil up there….I hit the f***ing wall.

“I know I hit oil. I hit it. I promise. I’ll argue with them all day long because I know I’m right.”

A NASCAR executive said cleanup workers felt no oil in the area in question.

Busch is now 10th in the standings, Earnhardt 11th.

“It is special to get through to the next round because the pressure that a lot of these drivers are going to have on them, and we had on us when this race started”, said Logano. Use it. Make someone other than Joey Logano, who led 227 of the 334 laps Sunday, happy. Passing proved hard at Charlotte, and the one-day delay due to rain may have also thrown teams off their game.

Dale Earnhardt Jr had a torrid race; contact with Carl Edwards at lap 69 pushed him up into the wall, which then led to a flat tire dropping him one lap down. Kenseth, 12th on the Chase standings is 32 points below the cutoff line.

Why is that important, you might ask? “That shuffled him back to where I was, and I’m racing to try to get by him”. “We still think we need to win next week”. Having advanced on points a year ago to runner-up in the championship, on this day Newman lost points primarily because his Richard Childress Racing Chevy just wasn’t quick enough on restarts.

Truex and his Canadian crew chief Cole Pearn go into Sunday’s race a solid third in the Chase for the Sprint Cup Championship and they hope to build on that this week. He dominated the Dover and New Hampshire Chase races, emerging victorious at Dover but running out of fuel with less than five laps remaining at New Hampshire. In 2012, AJ Allmendinger finished 32nd after starting from the pole.

Jeff Gordon is seventh on the Chase grid as he heads toward the final races of his storied career. He has wins at both Kansas and Talladega. Regardless, Kahne’s run at Charlotte Motor Speedway is the opposite of the cherry on top of the opposite of the sundae. Busch never seems to have great races in the Chase and even though he’s already surprised so many this season, I just don’t know if he can get the job done. The point standings between 5 of the chase drivers are separated by 1 point each, showing how crucial every position on the track is. Nobody else has more than 183. “I knew I had to hit my marks to maintain my cushion”. Cambridge native Kenseth suffered the biggest blow, going from first in points to last in the span of one afternoon.

Logano raced to his fourth victory of the season and his first career win at Charlotte. Harvick finished third in Logano’s win at Watkins Glen, where Harvick ran out of gas while leading on the last lap.

Although Harvick gets most of the attention, Logano has been right there with him in performance.

Johnson’s early exit from the race did have its perks.

“I’ll be honest with you, Talladega is still there”, Martin Truex Jr. said. But a third-place finish at Charlotte finished off a four-race stretch during which he also finished 11th, eighth and 13th. And to boot, his average finish this season is an 8.1 – best among championship contenders.

There wasn’t much doubt that Larson caused the accident – although Busch got collected because he faked an entrance to the pit road before trying to return to the track. Larson’s problem in fantasy is his consistency, but he’s shown raw speed, especially at Kansas.

But it turns out that disparity is one of the few the two drivers have when it comes to their statistics since the start of the 2014 season.

It’s understandable with the way teams have struggled with sponsorship in recent years that NASCAR does not want them to incur a bunch of extra costs by changing cars over in the middle of the season. Brad Keselowski has finished ninth or better in all eight races on 1.5-mile tracks and Logano has been sixth or better in six of the eight.