Mike Mulhern

Looks like it’s Ragan vs Bowyer vs Kahne in Richmond for that final NASCAR Sprint Cup playoff spot

David Ragan has been one of this season’s big surprises...and maybe sponsor AAA should have renewed its contract with this hot driver, instead of moving its money to the France family’s California Speedway (Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)

By Mike Mulhern

FONTANA, Calif. 

David Ragan stumbled just a bit Sunday night in his underdog bid to become this year’s Cinderella playoff story.
So he goes to Richmond this week with a clear game plan: he’s 17 points behind 12th place Clint Bowyer, and Ragan has to finish four or five positions ahead of him in Saturday night’s 400 to make the title chase. 
“We dug ourselves a bigger hole,” the second-year Jack Roush driver said after finishing 13th and losing a few more points to Bowyer in the race for the last playoff spot.
“But we just didn’t have the speed all night, and battled poor track position. We got it decent there at the end. If it had been a 600-mile race, maybe we could have picked up a few more spots.
“We’re in the same position at Richmond – we’ve just got to outrun everybody else.
“They can tell me where Clint is, and where everybody is, but you’re driving as hard as you can, and certainly we didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks.
“We’ve just got to have more speed, and we’ve just got to beat them on the track.  We can’t count on their misfortune; we’ve got to make sure we’re in the top two or three at Richmond.
“We’ve got to have more speed.”

Sunday night’s surprise, in a sense, was Greg Biffle, Ragan’s teammate. Still winless, Biffle made the strongest bid any could to tackle winner Jimmie Johnson, and he clinched a spot in the playoffs, which begin at Loudon, N.H., next week.
“Jimmie was phenomenal,” Biffle said in amazement. “We see that happen every once in a while—a guy gets it set up right, gets running good…we saw it in the Nationwide race (Kyle Busch’s runaway Saturday night) too.
“My guys, what a phenomenal job. So I feel bad. I let them down.  They were the fastest guys on pit road, and I’ve never had that before in my life.  It feels pretty good to beat everybody off of pit road time and time again.
“Jimmie wasn’t beating me on engine, that’s for sure. He just beat me around the corners just a little bit.”
Biffle and Greg Erwin, his crew chief, may, like Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus, finally be turning things around. “This is the best night we’ve had all season, beside Darlington,” Biffle said.
“And the pit stops, man, I don’t even know what to say—We beat everybody out every time. I’ve never had that happen before. 
“They’ve been working on the pit crew, shifting guys around, and it was pretty spectacular.
“I’m just real happy to get myself a spot in the chase this year. Jimmie was just a little bit faster here.
“We’ve gotten way better, as an organization and as a team.  Thanks to Robbie Reiser (the former Matt Kenseth crew chief, now shop foreman). 
“They made a commitment at the beginning of the year to shift some guys around, to put together the best teams we could. And it’s made an unbelievable difference. 
“I drove as hard as I’ve driven in a long time. I was just on the edge and I was running him down. I got within probably 10 car-lengths of him and was catching him two-tenths a lap, but he would get better as the run went. 
“I thought if I got close enough maybe I could make him start thinking about what’s behind him. And he was.
“I could gain three here, then lose two, gain three and lose two…so I didn’t know I was going to be able to do anything when I got there.”

Matt Kenseth, still vying for a playoff spot, was not that happy with his fifth Sunday. “We ran pretty good, it’s just that these things are pretty frustrating,” he said of the new winged car. “You can’t ever really go anywhere.
“Those top bunch of cars start there and run there all day. It’s just hard to do anything with these cars, so it gets a little frustrating.
“But we had a great day on pit road, we were able to pass some cars, and we got a good finish.
“Jimmie and Chad were awesome.  They always are, but you see a lot of races these days like that, where a guy will start up front and if he’s got a really fast car, he’ll just stay there. 
“It’s hard to adjust these things better…and it’s hard to adjust them bad.  When you’re right-on like that, and you get out in front in that clean air, it seemed like he was gone. 
“Greg could run with him, but that was about it.”

Carl Edwards failed to make it three-in-a-row. “It’s great to be disappointed as hell with sixth place.  That’s wonderful…but we really wanted three in a row.
“I think when the track changed, we weren’t quite on top of how our car was going to handle in the dark.  Sometimes you hit it, and sometimes you miss it. We just missed it.”

Team owner Rick Hendrick may face more pressure in the coming weeks than his teams, because adding Dale Earnhardt Jr. to the already successful Jeff Gordon-Jimmie Johnson roster hasn’t been a panacea. In fact some wonder if it’s been too much, upsetting the delicately balanced chemistry at Hendrick Motorsports.
After all, Gordon is still winless, and Earnhardt’s only win was one of those gas-mileage gambles.
Gordon?  “We want to perform well, we want to win races, we want to be competitive—it doesn’t do any good to be in the chase if you’re not competitive enough to win races and battle for the championship.”
“We have got some really good tracks for Jeff coming up,” Hendrick says. “But we’ve definitely got to get better on the 1-1/2-miles. We’ve had unbelievable things happen—breaking suspension pieces….
“But we just haven’t been as good, nowhere near as good as last year. We’ve just struggled.”

Clint Bowyer won Richmond in the spring, but he’ll have to rally at Richmond this weekend to make the chase(Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Elsewhere in the Chevy camp:
—Kevin Harvick finished fourth, moving him to seventh in the standings.  He has only finish 42nd or better at Richmond to clinch. “This is supposed to be our worst place. To come away with a top-five speaks a lot for (crew chief) Todd Berrier and what the guys have done. I am looking forward to getting going in the last 11 weeks.”
—Teammate Clint Bowyer finished 10th and clings to 12th in the standings. He needs to finish in front of David Ragan and Kasey Kahne at Richmond to clinch a spot.
—Earnhardt, 11th Sunday in a so-so performance, clinched a spot here. But he concedes he needs to run better to be a title factor: “We really needed to get the car up off the corner better. We were looking at Jimmie’s set-up and my set-up, and we see some areas where his stuff could help ours. At least that’s what I think.”
—So does Gordon, whose performances this year have generally been, well, terrible, for a four-time champ. He wound up 15th in the 500 and will clinch a playoff spot if he finished 23rd or better.
—Jeff Burton, 17th, locked up a spot. He’s fifth in points.

Marcos Ambrose, a newcomer to this sport, has less lofty goals at the moment, as he tries to find a niche in NASCAR. He finished only 32nd for the Woods, but “I finished my first 500-mile race….
“And it was definitely a long race. We came a long way over the course of the three days here, and I think we’ve got a clear direction.
“There were some changes we made that really got it going.  I was out there passing guys like Jeff Gordon, Clint Bowyer, those chase drivers in the second half of the race.
“We were a lap down in the second half, but our speed really gave me confidence.”

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