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The Top Five: Breaking down the Michigan race

Five thoughts following Sunday’s rain-shortened race at Michigan…

1. Ford Sure

From Friday onward, there seemed to be no doubt this would be a Ford-dominated weekend. And…yep! It definitely was. Fords accounted for seven of the top eight finishers — including a Stewart-Haas Racing podium sweep (the first by a single team since 2008, according to ESPN).

We hear all the time about how much this track matters to manufacturers, which is pretty much a cliche at this point. It’s like, “Yeah, OK, we get it. Michigan is important to the OEMs.”

But it really is SO important to those who work in the auto industry, which makes an ass-kicking of this magnitude quite special to Ford.

“Man, it’s just an unbelievable start to the season with the wins and success we’re having,” said Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports. “(We) come here to our home track with our employees here watching with their friends and family — to have this performance and strength across all of our teams, to win the race, it’s just tremendous for all the company.”

Ford has been having a great season (eight wins in 15 races plus the All-Star Race), but Michigan was the most dominant of Ford days.

So why this track? Perhaps the most crucial factor at the sweeping 2-mile oval was the engines.

“It’s a real honor to drive the Roush‑Yates engines when you get to a place like this because you can be a lot easier on your car,” Harvick said. “Doug Yates and those guys, they like to make big horsepower on the big end of the motor and put a lot of effort into this particular race weekend.”

Kurt Busch said Michigan is about bragging rights, and he can see the importance when all the bigwigs from various departments show up. And aside from just the engine, it’s hitting on every facet that truly elevates an organization.

“It’s a team effort to not have any weaknesses,” he said.

2. Boy oh Bowyer

Clint Bowyer’s career renaissance continued with his Michigan win, and there are likely more to come before the season is over.

A year like this one following a long slump makes for some fun stats, including:

— Bowyer went from October 2012 to March 2018 (nearly 5.5 years) between wins. Then it only took less than three months until his next win.

— Bowyer has almost as many wins this year (two) as he had top-10s in 2016 (three).

— Bowyer has now led 308 laps this season, which is more than double the previous four seasons combined (145).

No wonder the guy is so happy lately.

“We’re going to drink a little bit tonight, by the way,” he said. “That’s going to happen. I know you guys are questioning it. It’s going to happen tonight.”

3. No Hail Mary

Another wild-card type race, another lost chance for a driver outside the top 16 in points to steal a playoff bid. There was no Chris Buescher or Aric Almirola stealing a rain-shortened win this time, as a driver who already had a win just got another one.

Kasey Kahne crew chief Travis Mack had his driver stay out initially, but then called him to the pits before the final restart when the rain didn’t come in time.

Aside from that, it seemed surprising no one actually tried to pull some crazy strategy — especially in the win-and-in era. What do some of these teams have to lose?

I asked Bowyer crew chief Mike Bugarewicz about that, but he seemed to think the strategy wouldn’t have worked.

“In one sense, if you do that, yeah, maybe you win the race,” he said. “But I think if you’re that far off — if you’re a 24th-place car — I don’t know you’re going to compete with the top five cars (on a restart), to be honest. Maybe you can hold them off for a lap.

“Look at Harvick on the inside of us. We felt like we were a very competitive car. Him on four tires, it was a battle from that point coming to the start/finish line on the first lap. I think a guy staying out with no tires, already kind of struggling in the race, would have been a real challenge to try to pull that off.”

Maybe so. But based on the success of Kahne and Paul Menard using track position and clean air to run up front earlier in the race, you would have thought somebody would go for it with the rain about to arrive at any second.

 

4. NASCAR got it right in the rain

A rainy weekend like this one makes for intense scrutiny on NASCAR calls, but officials pretty much nailed it.

OK, there was that mixup at the end of the race where the pace car came down pit road when it wasn’t supposed to. But that didn’t affect anything about the race, since officials were just trying to end it at that point.

Other than that, all the calls were correct — even in tough circumstances.

Let’s start with Xfinity. Officials got past the end of Stage 2 despite a soggy day, then restarted the race after a caution as rain started to fall — a ballsy move, to be honest. It could have ended badly if the field had wrecked in the wet, but instead the fans at least got a battle for the win before the race-ending weather caution.

Then came Sunday. Everyone woke up a bit surprised with a drastically changed overnight forecast (which is why NASCAR hadn’t moved the race up with the 24-hour policy). A Monday race was starting to look like a foregone conclusion.

But officials waited out the rain, dried the track as fast as possible and then got the race started. There was an initial hiccup at the end of Stage 1 — NASCAR said pit road would be open before quickly realizing there weren’t enough laps in the stage to do so, then restarted the race with one lap to go in the stage.

NASCAR’s Richard Buck later said that was in line with policy. First of all, pit road is closed with two laps to go in a stage; second, teams had asked NASCAR to avoid situations under caution that would result in a strategy shakeup. That’s the fairest thing for everyone, which actually makes sense.

And finally, NASCAR called the race at the right time. With rain arriving again, there’s no chance the track could have been dried before darkness fell (Michigan doesn’t have lights).

Sometimes it seems that NASCAR makes questionable decisions, but I agree with all the ones they made this weekend — particularly under pressure.

5. Up Next

With no underdog taking advantage of a rain-shortened race at Michigan, there are seemingly three wild card races remaining of the 11 regular season events on the calendar: Sonoma, Daytona and Watkins Glen.

After an off-week next weekend, it’s time for Sonoma. It’s tempting to think an AJ Allmendinger type could win there, but recent Sonoma winners who are still active have been names like Harvick, Kyle Busch and Truex. So actually, it may be one of the familiar faces in victory lane instead.

That would be another blow to the playoff hopes of drivers mired deep in the standings — Jamie McMurray (19th), Daniel Suarez (21st) and Ryan Newman (22nd) among them — who could really use a road course win to propel them into the final 10 races this fall.

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Formula One Diary: Sunday night

I’m following the American-owned Haas F1 Team through its weekend at the only Formula One race in America: The United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas in Austin. This post is the sixth in a series.

I’ve spent the past four days documenting some of the differences between Formula One and NASCAR while experiencing my first F1 event. At times, it seemed very foreign — not just the accents, but the racing itself.

But fear not: Sunday’s United States Grand Prix actually showed how similar F1 and NASCAR can be.

Don’t believe me? Check out these quotes below and see if you can tell which were from the NASCAR race in Kansas and which were from the F1 race in Austin:

1. “The rules have got to be consistent. You can’t apply them differently to different instances. That’s our frustration out of today.”

2. “The problem is, we all spend an awful lot of money going racing. You want it to be consistently refereed — professionally refereed. And when you get decisions like today, it’s difficult to understand where the consistency is.”

3. “Where do you draw the line? For fans and casual viewers, it needs to be clear.”

4. “Don’t say everyone else can run off the track anywhere you like and never give any penalties — then I do it, and you give me a penalty.”

5. “I don’t know what any of the rules are. Seems like we’ve got a lot of stuff that kind of gets changed so often I honestly can’t keep up with it.”

Think you know the answers? Let’s see how you did.

— The first four quotes were all from the F1 race. Red Bull team principal Christian Horner made the first three comments, and No. 4 was a comment Max Verstappen made to NBCSN.

— Quote No. 5 is what Matt Kenseth said after a penalty for too many men over the wall ended his championship hopes at Kansas.

So there you have it. It took until the last lap of the F1 race, but it finally felt like someone was speaking my language.

Rules are a funny thing in racing. The complaints often turn out to be about the application of the rules rather than the worthiness of them.

For example: Martin Truex Jr. was penalized on a restart early in the Kansas race for going below the white line. That lit up NASCAR Twitter for two reasons — first of all, that penalty is not called very often (if ever); second, Kevin Harvick — the car behind Truex — did the same thing, but was not penalized.

According to reporters at the track, the rule was discussed in the drivers meeting and it only applied to the front row, so NASCAR probably called it correctly. But that sort of thing drives fans absolutely crazy, because getting it right this time means they’ve missed it in the past.

If there’s going to be a rule, all fans really want is for each driver to be treated the same — every time.

A similar scenario happened on the last lap in Austin. Verstappen, an electrifying 20-year-old racer, chased down Kimi Raikkonen and made a sick pass in the second-to-last corner of the race to earn a podium finish.

The fans were thrilled, and Verstappen was understandably giddy with glee on the radio. It was a fantastic moment!

But it didn’t last long, because F1 officials — or “stewards,” as they call them here — decided Verstappen had not stayed within the “track limits.” He used the inside of the turn and “left the track” to make his pass, which resulted in a five-second penalty.

Raikkonen got third place instead.

Now, was the penalty called correctly? By the letter of the law, yes. But it was a head-scratcher, since fans immediately started posting images on social media of several other drivers using the inside of Turn 19 (as well as Turn 9) without any penalty.

Horner, the Red Bull exec, worried that since F1 is trying to gain fans in the U.S., the inconsistency of the penalty would be a turnoff.

“Formula One is still immature in this country; and it’s a big race,” he said. “With the lack of consistency in the decisions, I should think all the viewers and fans watching today should not understand why (Raikkonen) was on the podium and not Max today.”

Don’t worry, Christian. American race fans are already used to inconsistency.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, lower right, tells reporters about his view of an inconsistent call that cost Max Verstappen a podium finish.

Just look at two weeks ago in Charlotte, when Jimmie Johnson’s crew was allowed to fasten a lug nut while the car wasn’t inside the pit box — something NASCAR later acknowledged was a rule it hadn’t even informed all the teams about.

It’s no wonder, then, that situations like Truex’s black flag or Kenseth’s penalty — where he had too many crew members working on his car in a crash damage situation — appeared questionable.

Both were actually the right call. In Kenseth’s case, that’s the rule and has been all year, and it was just enforced during last week’s race at Talladega.

But fans are so used to inconsistent enforcement of the rules, they assumed the calls were incorrect.

NASCAR — and F1 as well, it turns out — doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt that it’s making the right call. That’s something both forms of motorsport should strive to fix.

Related:

— Sunday morning diary on how to follow F1 as a new fan

— Saturday diary on the fan reception for Haas in Austin

—  Friday afternoon diary on Haas F1 Team’s growing pains

— Friday morning diary on the track walk and team dinner

— Thursday diary on media day