A NASCAR Cup Series first gave way to a familiar victory, as defending champion Kyle Larson returned to victory lane.
The NASCAR Cup Series’ annual descent upon New York State featured deja vu all over again, as defending circuit champion Kyle Larson won Sunday’s Go Bowling at The Glen for the second consecutive season at Watkins Glen International. Sunday’s event served as the penultimate race of the Cup Series’ regular season.
Larson, driver of the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, earned the 18th win of his Cup Series career and became the ninth driver to win multiple races at the 2.454-mile road course near Seneca Lake since NASCAR began making a yearly late summer visit in 1986. The victory completed a sweep of The Glen’s weekend doubleheader, as Larson also prevailed in the NASCAR Xfinity Series event on Saturday afternoon. In both cases, Larson held off A.J. Allmendinger, winner of the 2014 Cup event, to secure the victory.
Joey Logano finished third ahead of Larson’s Hendrick Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott while Daniel Suarez rounded out the top five.
Duel of the Mates
Larson’s win and the way he earned it was marked the end of a victorious yet testy day for Hendrick Motorsports. Rick Hendrick’s Chevrolets have now won each of the last four visits to The Glen, with Elliott’s No. 9 prevailing in 2018 and 2019 (The Glen’s date was moved to Daytona’s road course in 2020). It’s also the 10th victory overall for HMS at The Glen, dating back to Tim Richmond’s win in the aforementioned 1986 event.
Elliott seemed well on pace to earn his third Glen victory with just over 10 laps to go, owning a healthy lead over Larson before Joey Hand’s No. 15 Rick Ware Racing Chevrolet hit the tire wall in Turn 1 to bring out the caution on lap 79 of 90. He cleared Larson on the ensuing restart but was forced to try again when Loris Hezemans’ No. 27 Team Hezeberg Ford got stuck in the sand trap between the 10th and 11th turns.
Going green with five laps to go, Larson, starting next to Elliott in the double-file restart, had a slight edge headed into Turn 1 before breaking deep into the curve and pushing the No. 9 into the wider portions of the track. Elliott fell back as low as fifth as he regathered his Chevrolet and could only watch while Allmendinger tried in vain to chase down Larson.
While Larson’s celebration got underway, Elliott spoke with Hendrick and HMS Vice Chairman Jeff Gordon, himself a four-time winner at The Glen. While the 2020 series champion appeared to be disgruntled by Larson’s move, he had no apparent ill will toward Larson in his postrace pit road interview with NBC Sports, even though he kept his replies short.
“(It’s) always good to see HMS win. The boss deserves all the wins, all the great things that go on with this company,” Elliott said. “(Larson) did a great job. Seriously, they deserve it.”
“I told myself if I had a nose ahead of him before we got to the braking zone, I was going to have to try my best to maintain that, not let him get a nose ahead of me, pinch my corner off, end my chance of winning,” Larson said of the move in question. “ I had a good restart. I got in there hot. Did what I had to do to win. I’m not necessarily proud of it, especially with a teammate, but I feel like I had to execute that way to get the win.”
While Larson’s bid for a championship repeat was all but ready to roll, he hadn’t won since the second race of the season at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana 23 races ago, where another battle for the lead with Elliott went awry. Last season’s win at Watkins Glen was one of 10 wins for Larson en route to his first Cup Series title.
The No. 5 team’s title defense has been defined by a general sense of consistency (nine prior top five finishes entering Sunday), but it was nothing compared to the dominance of his championship run. Picking up a win in the second-to-last regular season event could help build momentum for the ten-race playoff ahead.
“Our cars have been really fast all year. I feel like all of Hendrick Motorsports has been really quick,” Larson said, as he’ll be joined in the playoffs by his teammates Elliott, Alex Bowman (14th on Sunday), and William Byron (22nd). “If we can continue to have days like today where we execute as good as we could, called a great race with pit strategy, we did a great job on our pit stops, every restart I think we moved forward, and we brought a fast race car again to the track. If we can continue to do that as we go onto these next 11 weeks, I’m pretty confident that we can go contend for another championship.”
Despite the late controversy, Elliott, Sunday’s polesitter, did secure the regular season championship after the first 20-lap stage of the race (won by Chase Briscoe). The regular season title comes with automatic entry to the playoffs (though Elliott was already locked in with a series-best four wins) and a 15-point bonus come playoff time.
Rain, Rain, You Can Stay
Much like their counterparts on the baseball diamond, NASCAR fans dread rain delays. But with Goodyear’s rain tires available for use at The Glen, Sunday’s race made history as it was the first race in the Next Gen car body era that featured racing in precipitation.
While standing and ponded water on the track still delayed the race’s scheduled start time by 100 minutes, a majority of the first stage was run on the rain tires with teams granted the option to change to the slicker, smooth Goodyears at their discretion. With the sun coming out shortly after the opening green flag dropped, all cars were on their dry tires by lap 18.
A pervious attempt at running in the rain was made last summer at Circuit of the Americas. Chaos reigned in that event, with several big wrecks downing contenders. This time around, the decision to start the race on rain tires was met positively and set the stage for clean racing over what could’ve been a chaotic opening.
“I think, in hindsight, NASCAR did a good job of how they managed the start of the race,” Cliff Daniels, the crew chief on Larson’s No. 5 Chevrolet, said. “ The rain tires seemed to do a good job, like we knew they would. Goodyear had done their homework on the tire. Once it dried out, our tires got punished, which is typically what we see.”
Continental Drift
More history on Sunday was made by one of the most diverse fields in NASCAR history, as a record seven home nations (including the United States) were represented by among the 39 participants. Most, however, struggled to make to make an impact.
While the Mexican-born, full-time driver Suarez (bound for the playoffs after a winning at a prior road course at Sonoma in June) finished fifth in the No. 99 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet, only Germany’s Mike Rockenfeller completed all 90 laps, bringing home Spire Motorsports’ No. 77 Chevrolet home 30th. The Dutch-born Hezemans was relegated to 34th after his encounter in the gravel while Daniil Kvyat (Russa) finished 36th. Kimi Raikkonen (Finland) and Kyle Tilley (Australia) both failed to finish.
Raikkonen, the 2007 Formula One champion, was the most prominent contender, making his Cup Series debut in a developmental No. 91 entry fielded by Trackhouse (whose full-time drivers, Suarez and Ross Chastain, are both playoff-bound). Nicknamed “The Iceman” Raikkonen ran respectably, reach as high as ninth on the leaderboard before his day ended early in a wreck with Austin Dillon. Raikkonen previously ran one race each in both the NASCAR Xfinity and Camping World Truck Series.
“It’s just really cool for him to step out of his comfort zone and come play with us stockcar racers,” Larson said of Raikkonen. “The international drivers racing today was pretty cool. I think I passed every one of them at some point. It was fun watching them up ahead of me being really aggressive.
“They’re as good as it gets when it comes to heavy braking, stuff like that. I could watch people up in front of them try to make a move on them, they wouldn’t be able to make the pass. That’s just their experience playing part today, and it was fun to be a spectator at points in the race.”
Notables
- With Larson earning his second win of the season, no 2022 regular season winners will be kept out of the playoff. Kurt Busch, who has missed the last five races after suffering a concussion during qualifying at Pocono, would’ve been the odd man out as the lowest ranked winner in the current standings. Busch already plans to skip next week’s regular season finale and has been relieved by Ty Gibbs (26th) in the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota.
- As it stands, there is one playoff spot available for non-winners. Ryan Blaney (24th) leads Martin Truex Jr. (23rd) by 25 points entering the finale. The two respectively rank third and sixth in the standings not adjusted for the playoffs. Either driver can clinch the spot with a win next weekend, but both will be eliminated if any of the 13 winless drivers in the top 30 points earns it instead.
- Michael McDowell, one of the winless, finished sixth in the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford. McDowell has now earned top tens in each of his last four road course starts and his first at Watkins Glen. McDowell also led 14 laps while his teammate, rookie Todd Gilliland led eight more in the No. 38 Ford. Gilliland, another winless contender, failed to finish after he lost an axle and finished 38th.
- Kevin Harvick finished 12th in the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford after winning each of the last two races at Michigan and Richmond.
- Logano, locked into the playoffs in the No. 22 Team Penske Ford, won the second 20-lap stage. His third-place finish was his first in his last nine road course attempts (dating back to Sonoma in June 2021) and the 15 laps he led were a career-best on such tracks (only the fifth time in 38 attempts he led more than 10).
Up Next
The 2022 NASCAR Cup Series regular season comes to an end on Saturday at the legendary Daytona International Speedway’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 (7 p.m. ET, NBC). Daytona’s 400-mile summer race has been the regular season finale since 2020 and has produced some of the most thrilling finishes in recent memory. Blaney is the defending winner of the event, which has not seen a repeat since 2006 (Tony Stewart, the all-time leader in Watkins Glen victories with five).
Geoff Magliocchetti is on Twitter @GeoffJMags
Baseline Sports NY is on Twitter @Baseline_NY
