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coimbrabertone · 8 days ago

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Martinsville Cooked...Until It Was Cooked

Now, I will go ahead and admit this: I think I'm the polar opposite of a NASCAR boomer when it comes to tracks. I like most of the 1.5s, while I generally find the little bullrings like Bristol and Martinsville to be more demo derby than good racing. That being said...I think the Martinsville cutoff race yesterday delivered.

At least until the playoff shenanigans soured the end of the race.

One step back though, because let me set the stage for all this first.

I missed stage one of the race, ironically enough - I needed a bit of a break from racing after the Brazilian Grand Prix went from a chaotic wet race to the worst guy in the sport running away with it - but when I tuned in early on in stage two, it was already looking surprisingly good.

Chase Elliott was leading off strategy, Byron was gaining on him, but then behind them it was a pair of Fords battling with Brad Keselowski ahead of Ryan Blaney. Now, the way things were going, Byron could point his way into the championship four, as could Christopher Bell in the #20 Toyota, but...

Chase Elliott in the #9 Hendrick Chevrolet, Kyle Larson in the #5 Hendrick Chevrolet, and Ryan Blaney in the #12 Penske Ford were all heading towards a must-win scenario.

Thus, we had two Hendrick teammates battling and potentially knocking each other out of the playoffs, while behind, a pair of Fords were reeling them in.

Brad Keselowski was out of the playoffs, but he was racing for pride. He wanted to win at Martinsville.

Ryan Blaney, however, won at Martinsville the previous year to advance to Phoenix and won the championship that way.

Then Byron gets ahead of Elliott.

But...a caution comes out for Burton spinning, and it immediately breeds another when Truex also goes around. For a moment, I thought "ah crap we're getting into the short track nonsense part of the race" but no, not quite...instead, it led to a crucial strategic choice.

Byron and Elliott both pit off the Truex caution, Blaney and Keselowski stay out, along with Hamlin and Bell who are also sniffing the chance to advance.

And to add insult to injury, Elliott has a slow stop and drops to the back of the fresh tyre cars.

Keselowski gets out ahead and manages to win the second stage ahead of Blaney, Hamlin, Larson, Byron, and Bell.

This stage makes it official that Blaney and Elliott are must-wins, and Hamlin is more or less in the same boat. With non-playoff car Keselowski in the lead, as they run:

Logano is locked in from his win at Vegas.

Reddick is locked in from his win at Homestead.

Byron is 15 points above the cutoff line.

Larson is 6 points above.

Bell is 6 points below but can win tiebreakers off of previous results.

Hamlin is 17 below.

Ryan Blaney must win to advance.

Chase Elliott must win to advance.

Bell, however, can clinch a spot no matter what so long as he finishes 13th or above, therefore, Byron and Larson are in a points battle for the fourth and final spot. A points battle that becomes a moot point if any one of Hamlin, Blaney, or Elliott win.

Stage three is quite literally 200 laps long, so it turns into a bit of a lull for awhile as cars need to knock off laps, but then...Ryan Blaney begins his charge.

He overtakes Larson, goes hunting down Byron.

Catches Byron as William is lapping Shane Van Gisbergen, so Ryan Blaney bumps SVG up and into Byron, slipping underneath the both of them to take position. This is the kind of move that they say Martinsville is all about, bumping, banging, ruthless, but smart. All three cars continue.

Blaney again catches up to Keselowski but the #6 is a wily old fox and makes it hard to pass.

Fast forward to 117 to go, and it looks an awful lot like stage two; Elliott is leading after an earlier pitstop gave him the undercut, Byron is faster and is hunting him down, while Keselowski and Blaney in the Fords are also entering the picture.

A spin by Carson Hocevar gives all of them the chance to pit.

Meanwhile, Byron, Larson, Ryan Preece, and Austin Cindric stay out, making a play for track position.

The green flag comes out, Larson overtakes Byron, Cindric overtakes Preece, and the yellow comes out again as Kyle Busch lost a wheel on the restart. Byron is angry because he feels they shouldn't have restarted at all given a car lost a wheel, but NASCAR declares that Larson is the leader.

And in the following stint, things start to fall apart for Byron.

Elliott gets him off the restart, Blaney follows not long after, and even the likes of Cindric and Hamlin start pressuring him.

So at this point, it's Larson, Elliott, and Blaney the top three and each of them are in must-win scenarios given how Byron is running and how Bell has a points advantage.

Elliott forces his way inside of Larson to take the lead with 24 to go and completes the pass in turn one, keeping Larson out wide as Blaney grabs the draft and tries to follow him through.

Larson gets down in front of Blaney before turn three, but Larson is maybe a foot higher up in the lane than Blaney is, and that's all Ryan needs as he bumps Larson up in just the right way and then barges through to go side-by-side onto the start-finish straight, completing the pass in turn one.

Larson tries to bump Blaney up and retake the position, but Blaney keeps enough traction in the upper groove to come out ahead onto the backstretch. Now, he starts reeling in Elliott.

Ten laps later, Blaney sends it up the inside in turn three, gets a nose ahead through four, and comes onto the start-finish straight ahead of Elliott to take the lead with fourteen laps to go. Blaney restarted behind Cindric and Hamlin, overtook them both, overtook Byron, and charged through Larson and Elliott as well.

He literally moved through 3/4ths of Hendrick Motorsports to move into the lead. A hell of a drive.

Unfortunately...this is where the shitshow began.

Hamlin and Cindric moved ahead of the struggling Byron as well by this point, so Byron is sixth, the worst position he can be in and still advance. Ross Chastain, Austin Dillon, and Brad Keselowski are all behind Byron and are all faster.

Now, William Byron drives for Chevy, as do Chastain and Dillon.

Joey Logano, locked into the playoffs already, is a Ford driver.

Tyler Reddick, also locked in, drives for Toyota.

Ryan Blaney, about to win his way in, is in a Ford.

Larson and Elliott are out of it with Blaney winning and pulling ahead, while Christopher Bell with the points advantage is in 19th in a Toyota. Byron needs to finish 13 places ahead of Bell to advance, and 6 is exactly 13 ahead of 19.

If Chastain or Dillon pass their fellow Chevrolet, they'd be knocking their manufacturer out of the final four.

So instead, Dillon plants himself on the bottom, Chastain on the top, and they effectively block for Byron, keeping him in sixth place regardless of how slow he is.

So, Chevy is making sure that Byron doesn't lose points.

Now, what does Toyota do?

Well, Bubba Wallace starts reporting with three to go that he feels like a tyre is going down. He is off the pace, and Bell starts gaining on him, passing him in the final corner of the final lap.

Pause now, because what happens next flips the script.

At this moment, with Bell going around him, does Bubba Wallace really have a tyre going down? Technically speaking, it doesn't even matter, because he doesn't say he for sure has one, just that it feels like he has one. There's no penalty for thinking your car has a problem and driving accordingly.

And from his onboard, he does definitely seem to be struggling, and you can see cars going past him and establishing a gap.

That being said, as far back as ten to go, Bubba's onboard does show his spotter keeping him informed of the points situation between Byron and Bell.

And here's an interesting thing as well: at the start of the final lap, Wallace is forced high as Byron, Dillon, Chastain, Keselowski, and Logano, that whole group of cars, goes underneath him to put a lap on him. So he clearly sees the two Chevys behind Byron protecting him from the pair of Fords behind.

The #20 of Bell, also a lap down, tries to take the opportunity to slip under Wallace as well, however, he has a wobble in the middle of it, loses control, and hits the wall. Bell panics, throttles it, and rides the wall to the finish, crossing the line in 18th place.

This ties things with Byron, thus, Bell advances off the back of a tiebreaker.

The problem here is...you smell that smell? Yeah, that's the stench of bullshit.

You quite literally have two cases of race manipulation to gets drivers into the final four. Byron had two other Chevrolets blocking for him in a move which the fanbase has already memed as either Byron's Armada or the Chevy Motorcade - let me know which one you think is funnier in the comments - while with Toyota...

The generous interpretation is that Wallace had a genuine problem, was slow, and his spotter was keeping him informed on Bell just to keep one Toyota from taking out another.

The less generous interpretation is that 23XI informed Wallace that Bell was behind and needed one more point to advance, so they had Wallace fake a problem and deliberately slow down to make sure that Bell got through.

Bell did get through, however, he slipped on the marbles as it happened and wound up in the wall and decided to ride the wall to the finish. This is problematic, as the Martinsville wall ride was explicitly banned after 2022 when Ross Chastain used it to propel himself into the final four.

There is a bit of a distinction, in that Bell was initially attempting the corner instead of full throttling it into the wall, however, the end result is the same as Bell was full throttle against the wall at the end.

And that wall ride, I think, gave NASCAR an easy out as we unpause, because it makes what Christopher Bell did go from dubiously legal to definitely illegal.

You see, without it, you had Chevy definitely doing some race manipulation to keep Byron in the playoffs, while Toyota very likely had race manipulation as well to get Bell into the final four, so this was going to be a very sticky situation as NASCAR would have to figure out how to put an end to these manufacturer games.

Manufacturer games which have already flared up twice this season. First at Daytona, when RCR got pissed off at Parker Retzlaff for pushing Harrison Burton in an attempt to win the race, rather than helping Kyle Busch in another Chevrolet take the win.

Secondly, at Talladega, where Kyle Larson didn't push the Ford of Brad Keselowski to the win, instead allowing the fellow Chevy of Ricky Stenhouse Jr. to take the victory.

These races have decided who goes to the playoffs and who advances in the Round of 12, and now, we've seen two manufacturers manipulating the cutoff race for the final four.

And at least in the case of Chevrolet, we know for sure that there was a coordinated effort to help Byron.

Why? Well, remember Austin Dillon's spotter from Richmond? The guy who yelled "wreck him!" over a monitored radio channel as Dillon took a swipe at Hamlin to win the race? A bit of radio that caused NASCAR to strip Austin Dillon of a playoff berth?

Well, Dillon's spotter, henceforth known as Loose Lips, said the following things over the radio:

LL: "The #24 is two points to the good, if we pass him, he'll be out."

AD: "Does the #1 know the deal?"

LL: "Trying to find him to tell him...Justin, can you tell the crew chief also, clear off."

AD: "Does the #1 crew chief know the deal?"

LL: "Yeah, he should"

Like...Jesus Christ you amateur, watch what you say when you're doing something borderline illegal. You'd think he'd learn his lesson after the whole Richmond thing but evidently not.

So yeah, Chevrolet was definitely helping Byron, and as for Bubba Wallace, his car is currently being torn down by NASCAR. According to Bob Pockrass, the expectation is that there will be some sort of penalty if NASCAR finds nothing wrong with the car.

Oh and, because of how toxic the NASCAR fanbase is, I have to say this part: Bubba Wallace did what his team and his manufacturer expected him to do. The fact that he is black does not make him any more guilty than Austin Dillon or Ross Chastain.

Unfortunately, if Bubba Wallace is found to have helped Bell, I expect he'll receive the blunt of the criticism from a certain subsection of the fanbase. Don't be like them. Wallace is not the problem, Chastain is not the problem, Dillon, as dumb as he and his spotter are, is not the problem either.

Chevrolet wants a Chevy to win the championship, Toyota wants a Toyota to win the championship.

This is an inevitable result of the increasing amount of manufacturer alliances and tiered support.

So yeah, Chevy was stinking up the show, Toyota was probably stinking up the show as well, and that little wall ride by Bell gave NASCAR a way of ruling on the issue without addressing the core issue.

Both Byron and Bell benefitted from cars of the same manufacturer, so you can't punish one without punishing the other, however, Bell is the only one to benefit from a wall ride, therefore, NASCAR sends him to the back of the field based off that, and Byron advances to the final four with none of the manufacturer stuff addressed.

We'll see this week if NASCAR rules on either incident, but I'm not holding out hope.

NASCAR is not going to do anything that might piss off a manufacturer, not when nobody new has entered the sport since 2007.

Anyway, I feel bad for Blaney in all this, because he had this heroic drive to overtake all these other playoff cars and advance to the final four, getting the chance to defend his title. And instead of talking about that, everyone's just talking about this Chevy and Toyota drama.

So of the championship four: Tyler Reddick's team is suing NASCAR, Joey Logano is fifteenth in regular points and only got this far because Bowman was disqualified at the Charlotte roval, and William Byron advanced off the back of all this bullshit.

I really hope Ryan Blaney wins the championship, because anyone else would lead to an unbearable amount of offseason discourse.

#motorsports #racing #nascar #nascar cup #christopher bell #william byron #ross chastain #austin dillon #bubba wallace #Loose Lips the Richard Childress Racing Spotter

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