Keselowski wins in Vegas as Dale Jr. runs dry on final lap

By Mar 9, 2014, 5:58 PM EDT
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On a somber day for the Ford Motor Company, Brad Keselowski gave the Blue Oval camp a reason to smile.

After winning yesterday’s NASCAR Nationwide Series race, the 2012 Sprint Cup champion passed Dale Earnhardt Jr. for the lead on the final lap after he ran out of gas coming off of Turn 2.

Keselowski went on to claim his first career Sprint Cup victory on the 1.5-mile Vegas oval, which enabled him to pull within one point of Earnhardt for the Sprint Cup championship lead going into next weekend’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway.

The victory also came hours after William Clay Ford, the director emeritus of the Ford Motor Company and owner/chairman of the NFL’s Detroit Lions, passed away at the age of 88 from pneumonia.

As a native of Rochester Hills, Michigan – not far from the manufacturer’s world headquarters in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn – Keselowski is aware of the impact Mr. Ford had on his community.

“He’s a big deal where I’m from in Detroit,” he said to Fox Sports in Victory Lane. “We want to say our thoughts and prayers are with his family.”

But while he paid tribute to Mr. Ford, Keselowski was also thrilled to have virtually ensured his place in the Chase for the Sprint Cup after failing to qualify for the postseason last year.

Shortly after the final restart with 42 laps to go, Keselowski found himself battling Carl Edwards (who, along with Earnhardt, had stayed out on that previous yellow) for second before managing to get past the fellow Ford driver for the position.

That enabled him to go after Earnhardt, who had been told by crew chief Steve Letarte that he was likely to come up narrowly short on fuel.

“Carl Edwards helped me out there – he gave me a little break so I could go run down the 88 and that’s what we needed for a Ford to win,” Keselowski said. “We needed to put pressure on Dale and not let him get into fuel save mode, because you could tell he was getting close.”

With four laps remaining, Keselowski briefly took the lead from Earnhardt on the inside of Turn 1 but lost it back one turn later as Earnhardt got a great run off the high line.

Earnhardt pulled out to a half-second lead by the time the white flag came out. But unfortunately for him and Letarte, the latter’s prediction proved correct.

“We weren’t gonna run first or second had we not stayed out on that strategy,” said Earnhardt, who coasted home for the runner-up finish. “We knew we were a lap short and tried to save as much as we could. We got it to half a lap [short] and it ran out off of [Turn] 2 there.

“We took the gamble and didn’t win the race but it still worked in our favor to run second. It gave us a chance to win. It sucks to lose like that but we can’t let that be a negative. We gotta go to Bristol and try to win there, and the only way to be productive is to be positive.”

Paul Menard put together a stout run for Richard Childress Racing, finishing third for his best finish since his third-place run back in October 2012 at Kansas Speedway.

But don’t expect Menard to celebrate Vegas-style as he has very important business to attend to back home in North Carolina: The birth of his first child.

“Daytona was really good for us and we struggled at Phoenix but these guys never gave up,” said Menard, who recorded his third consecutive Top-10 at Las Vegas.

“The car was really good on long runs. On Thursday, we had a test day and we were really good on race trim. We had no speed at all in qualifying trim, but we went back to race trim and it was fast again…It’s something we can definitely build on for mile-and-a-half [tracks].”

Pole sitter Joey Logano recorded his second straight fourth-place finish, while Edwards went on to round out the Top 5.

NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES
Kobalt 400 – Las Vegas Motor Speedway
Unofficial Results

1) Brad Keselowski
2) Dale Earnhardt Jr.
3) Paul Menard
4) Joey Logano
5) Carl Edwards
6) Jimmie Johnson
7) Ryan Newman
8) Kasey Kahne
9) Jeff Gordon
10) Matt Kenseth
11) Kyle Busch
12) Denny Hamlin
13) Brian Vickers
14) Martin Truex Jr.
15) Jamie McMurray
16) Austin Dillon
17) Jeff Burton
18) A.J. Allmendinger
19) Kyle Larson
20) Trevor Bayne
21) Danica Patrick
22) Greg Biffle
23) Clint Bowyer
24) Marcos Ambrose
25) Aric Almirola
26) Kurt Busch
27) Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.
28) Casey Mears
29) Michael Annett
30) David Gilliland
31) Justin Allgaier
32) David Ragan
33) Tony Stewart
34) Reed Sorenson
35) Ryan Truex
36) Cole Whitt
37) Alex Bowman
38) Timmy Hill
39) Travis Kvapil
40) Parker Kligerman
41) Kevin Harvick
42) Josh Wise
43) Michael McDowell

Roger Penske vows new downtown Detroit GP will be bigger than the Super Bowl for city

By Jun 1, 2023, 2:00 PM EDT
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DETROIT – He helped spearhead bringing the town a Super Bowl 17 years ago, but Roger Penske believes the reimagined Chevrolet Detroit GP is his greatest gift to the Motor City.

“It’s bigger than the Super Bowl from an impact within the city,” Penske told NBC Sports. “Maybe not with the sponsors and TV, but for the city of Detroit, it’s bigger than the Super Bowl.

“We’ve got to give back individually and collectively, and I think we as a company in Michigan and in Detroit, it’s something we know how to do. It shows we’re committed. Someone needs to take that flag and run it down through town. And that’s what we’re trying to do as a company. We’re trying to give back to the city.”

After 30 years of being run on Belle Isle, the race course has been moved to a new nine-turn, 1.7-mile downtown layout that will be the centerpiece of an event weekend that is designed to promote a festival and community atmosphere.

There will be concerts in the adjacent Hart Plaza. Local businesses from Detroit’s seven districts have been invited to hawk their wares to new clientele. Boys and Girls Clubs from the city have designed murals that will line the track’s walls with images of diversity, inclusion and what Detroit means through the eyes of youth.

And in the biggest show of altruism, more than half the circuit will be open for free admission. The track is building 4-foot viewing platforms that can hold 150 people for watching the long Jefferson Avenue straightaway and other sections of the track.

Detroit GP chairman Bud Denker, a longtime key lieutenant across Penske’s various companies, has overseen more than $20 million invested in infrastructure.

The race is essentially Penske’s love letter to the city where he made much of his fame as one of Detroit’s most famous automotive icons, both as a captain of industry with a global dealership network and as a racing magnate (who just won his record 19th Indy 500 with Josef Newgarden breaking through for his first victory on the Brickyard oval).

During six decades in racing, Penske, 86, also has run many racetracks (most notably Indianapolis Motor Speedway but also speedways in Michigan, California and Pennsylvania), and much of that expertise has been applied in Detroit.

“And then the ability for us to reach out to our sponsor base, and then the business community, which Bud is tied in with the key executives in the city of Detroit, bringing them all together,” Penske said. “It makes a big difference.

“The Super Bowl is really about the people that fly in for the Super Bowl. It’s a big corporate event, and the tickets are expensive. And the TV is obviously the best in the world. What we’ve done is taken that same playbook but made it important to everyone in Detroit. Anyone that wants to can come to the race for free, can stand on a platform or they can buy a ticket and sit in the grandstands or be in a suite. It’s really multiple choice, but it is giving it to the city of Detroit. I think it’s important when you think of these big cities across the country today that are having a lot of these issues.”

Denker said the Detroit Grand Prix is hoping for “an amazingly attended event” but is unsure of crowd estimates with much of the track offering free viewing. The race easily could handle a crowd of at least 50,000 daily (which is what the Movement Music Festival draws in Hart Plaza) and probably tens of thousands more in a sprawling track footprint along the city’s riverwalk.

Penske is hoping for a larger crowd than Belle Isle, which was limited to about 30,000 fans daily because of off-site parking and restricted fan access at a track that was located in a public park.

The downtown course will have some unique features, including a “split” pit lane on an all-new concrete (part of $15 million spent on resurfaced roads, new barriers and catchfencing … as well as 252 manhole covers that were welded down).

A $5 million, 80,000-square-foot hospitality chalet will be located adjacent to the paddock and pit area. The two-story structure, which was imported from the 16th hole of the Waste Management Open in Phoenix, will offer 70 chalets (up from 23 suites at Belle Isle last year). It was built by InProduction, the same company that installed the popular HyVee-branded grandstands and suites at Iowa Speedway last year.

Penske said the state, city, county and General Motors each owned parts of the track, and their cooperation was needed to move streetlights and in changing apexes of corners. Denker has spent the past 18 months meeting with city council members who represent Detroit’s seven districts, along with Mayor Mike Duggan. Penske said the local support could include an appearance by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Witmer.

Denker and Detroit GP  president Michael Montri were inspired to move the Detroit course downtown after attending the inaugural Music City Grand Prix in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We saw what an impact it made on that city in August of 2021 and we came back from there and said boy could it ever work to bring it downtown in Detroit again,” Denker said. “We’ve really involved the whole community of Detroit, and the idea of bringing our city together is what the mayor and city council and our governor are so excited about. The dream we have is now coming to fruition.

“When you see the infrastructure downtown and the bridges over the roads we’ve built and the graphics, and everything is centered around the Renaissance Center as your backdrop, it’s just amazing.”