No miracle for Keselowski, who misses out on post-season - MotorSportsTalk

The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series will have a new champion in 2013.

Brad Keselowski led a race-high 142 laps on Saturday at Richmond International Raceway, but ultimately faded to a disappointing 17th-place result on a night where he needed to win in order to have any hope of a spot in the Chase.

“We were pretty good at the start and led a lot of laps…But we just weren’t strong enough to really stay up there,” Keselowski said. “We needed clean air to really run well and once we lost that, we just weren’t strong enough.”

Saturday may well have been a microcosm of Keselowski’s season, which has seen him show blazing speed at times but also extended periods of inconsistency as well.

After taking the lead twice for short periods in the opening stages, Keselowski settled in for a longer run up front after passing Jamie McMurray for the point following a restart at Lap 143.

He would repeatedly lose and regain the lead as the race went across the halfway mark, but was still running second with 100 laps to go in the 400-lap event. Then, it seemed his car began to get away from him as he started to slip down the running order.

A run-in with Kevin Harvick caused Keselowski to declare over his team’s radio that he would “use the [expletive] out of the 29 [Harvick]” once he got new tires. But by the time he got those fresh Goodyears during a stop with 60 laps left, he had already lost critical track position.

“That is just the way our cars have been this year,” he said. “They haven’t been good enough and we haven’t executed as well as we needed to. We have work to do.

“At the end of the day, the thing about points is it is the best measuring stick in sports. You know who deserves to be where because the results speak for themselves. We didn’t have enough results to get where we needed to be.”

Keselowski has now become the second defending champion to miss out on the Chase the following season since its inception in 2004. It will be interesting to see how much support he’ll give Penske Racing teammate Joey Logano, who did manage to clinch a Chase berth in Richmond.

For his part, Logano believes that Keselowski will make a return to Victory Lane before the year is out. But he needed to do that on Saturday night, and couldn’t.

“I don’t really have any emotions right now,” Keselowski said. “We weren’t good enough to make it and we didn’t. That is the reality.”

A cold, hard reality.

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INDIANAPOLIS — The first Indy 500 victory for Josef Newgarden also was the richest in race history from a record 2023 purse of just more than $17 million.

The two-time NTT IndyCar Series champion, who continued his celebration Monday morning at Indianapolis Motor Speedway earned $3.666 million for winning the 107th running of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

The purse and winner’s share both are the largest in the history of the Indianapolis 500.

It’s the second consecutive year that the Indy 500 purse set a record after the 2022 Indy 500 became the first to crack the $16 million mark (nearly doubling the 2021 purse that offered a purse of $8,854,565 after a crowd limited to 135,000 because of the COVID-19 pandemic).

The average payout for IndyCar drivers was $500,600 (exceeding last year’s average of $485,000).

Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Roger Penske, whose team also fields Newgarden’s No. 2 Dallara-Chevrolet, had made raising purses a priority since buying the track in 2020. But Penske but was unable to post big money purses until the race returned to full capacity grandstands last year.

The largest Indy 500 purse before this year was $14.4 million for the 2008 Indy 500 won by Scott Dixon (whose share was $2,988,065). Ericsson’s haul made him the second Indy 500 winner to top $3 million (2009 winner Helio Castroneves won $3,048,005.

Runner-up Marcus Ericsson won $1.043 million after falling short by 0.0974 seconds in the fourth-closest finish in Indy 500 history.

The 107th Indy 500 drew a crowd of at least 330,000 that was the largest since the sellout for the 100th running in 2016, and the second-largest in more than two decades, according to track officials.

“This is the greatest race in the world, and it was an especially monumental Month of May featuring packed grandstands and intense on-track action,” Penske Entertainment president and CEO Mark Miles said in a release. “Now, we have the best end card possible for the 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500: a record-breaking purse for the history books.”

Benjamin Pedersen was named the Indy 500 rookie of the year, earning a $50,000 bonus.

The race’s purse is determined through contingency and special awards from IMS and IndyCar. The awards were presented Monday night in the annual Indy 500 Victory Celebration at the JW Marriott in downtown Indianapolis.

The payouts for the 107th Indy 500:

1. Josef Newgarden, $3,666,000
2. Marcus Ericsson, $1,043,000
3. Santino Ferrucci, $481,800
4. Alex Palou, $801,500
5. Alexander Rossi, $574,000
6. Scott Dixon, $582,000
7. Takuma Sato, $217,300
8. Conor Daly, $512,000
9. Colton Herta, $506,500
10. Rinus VeeKay, $556,500
11. Ryan Hunter‐Reay, $145,500
12. Callum Ilott, $495,500
13. Devlin DeFrancesco, $482,000
14. Scott McLaughlin, $485,000
15. Helio Castroneves, $481,500
16. Tony Kanaan, $105,000
17. Marco Andretti, $102,000
18. Jack Harvey, $472,000
19. Christian Lundgaard, $467,500
20. Ed Carpenter, $102,000
21. Benjamin Pedersen (R), $215,300
22. Graham Rahal, $565,500*
23. Will Power, $488,000
24. Pato O’Ward, $516,500
25. Simon Pagenaud, $465,500
26. Agustín Canapino (R), $156,300
27. Felix Rosenqvist, $278,300
28. Kyle Kirkwood, $465,500
29. David Malukas, $462,000
30. Romain Grosjean, $462,000
31. Sting Ray Robb (R), $463,000
32. RC Enerson (R), $103,000
33. Katherine Legge, $102,000

*–Broken down between two teams, $460,000 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, $105,500 Dreyer & Reinbold Racing/Cusick Motorsports