Matt Kenseth lost the battle Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway – but he may have positioned himself to win a bigger fight.
Searching for his first Sprint Cup win of the season, Kenseth moved from third to the lead when he stayed on the track during a debris caution with 69 laps left in the Irwin Tools Night Race.
But the call did not work out as well as Kenseth surely hoped. With 45 laps to go, Joey Logano took the lead from Kenseth on the inside and went on to earn his third win of the season.
As for Kenseth, he ceded second place to Brad Keselowski a short time later and finished third.
However, while the zero in the win column remains, Kenseth’s points gap over 17th-place Kyle Larson in the Chase standings grew by a considerable margin.
Coming into Saturday’s race, it had been 58 points after he was collected in a crash last week at Michigan. But Kenseth will be leaving Thunder Valley with an 83-point cushion over Larson.
“I just knew that new tires for the set-up we had tonight and what our car would do in traffic – I just knew that clean air was going to do more than new tires,” said Kenseth, who led 62 laps.
“Maybe we could have got tires and beat those guys – I mean, we’ll never know – but on restarts, I just had such a hard time. I knew clean air would cover up a lot of problems.
“We missed a little bit tonight, but overall, it was a good night for our Dollar General 75th Anniversary car. Man, I wanted to win that thing in the worst way, but I just couldn’t hold ’em off.”
Still, Kenseth’s Chase position has gone from good to excellent. While he was defeated by Logano in the end, the Team Penske driver’s win ensures that at least two winless drivers will make the Chase on points.
That’s big for both Kenseth and the next man behind him on the Chase Grid, 14th-place Ryan Newman.
Newman also bolstered his own points cushion over Larson on Saturday by finishing 13th. He’s now 42 points ahead of the rookie with two regular season races to go; the cushion was at 28 markers before.
Media and fan attention focused on a controversial run-in between Haiden Deegan and his Monster Energy Yamaha Star Racing teammate Jordon Smith during Round 10 of the Monster Energy Supercross race at Detroit, after which the 250 East points’ Hunter Lawrence defends the young rider in the postrace news conference.
Deegan took the early lead in Heat 1 of the round, but the mood swiftly changed when he became embroiled in a spirited battle with teammate Smith.
On Lap 3, Smith caught Deegan with a fast pass through the whoops. Smith briefly held the lead heading into a bowl turn but Deegan had the inside line and threw a block pass. In the next few turns, the action heated up until Smith eventually ran into the back of Deegan’s Yamaha and crashed.
One of the highlights of the battle seemed to include a moment when Deegan waited on Smith in order to throw a second block pass, adding fuel to the controversy.
After his initial crash, Smith fell to seventh on the next lap. He would crash twice more during the event, ultimately finishing four laps off the pace in 20th.
The topic was inevitably part of the postrace news conference.
Smith had more trouble in the Last Chance Qualifier. He stalled his bike in heavy traffic, worked his way into a battle for fourth with the checkers in sight, but crashed a few yards shy of the finish line and was credited with seventh. Smith earned zero points and fell to sixth in the standings.
Jordon Smith failed to make the Detroit Supercross Main and fell to sixth in the points. – Feld Motor Sports
“I think he’s like fifth in points,” Deegan said. “He’s a little out of it. Beside that it was good, I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
Deegan jokingly deflected an earlier question with the response that he wasn’t paying attention during the incident.
“He’s my teammate, but he’s a veteran, he’s been in this sport for a while,” Deegan said. “I was up there just battling. I want to win as much as everybody else. It doesn’t matter if it’s a heat race or a main; I just want to win. I was just trying to push that.”
As Deegan and Smith battled, Jeremy Martin took the lead. Deegan finished second in the heat and backed up his performance with a solid third-place showing in the main, which was his second podium finish in a short six-race career. Deegan’s first podium was earned at Daytona, just two rounds ago.
But as Deegan struggled to find something meaningful to say, unsurprisingly for a 17-year-old rider who was not scheduled to run the full 250 schedule this year, it was the championship leader Lawrence who came to his defense.
A block pass by Haiden Deegan led to a series of events that eventually led to Jordon Smith failing to make the Main. – Feld Motor Sports
“I just want to point something out, which kind of amazes me,” Lawrence said during the conference. “So many of the people on social media, where everyone puts their expertise in, are saying the racing back in the ’80s, the early 90s, when me were men. They’re always talking about how gnarly it was and then anytime a block pass or something happens now, everyone cries about it.
“That’s just a little bit interesting. Pick one. You want the gnarly block passes from 10 years ago and then you get it, everyone makes a big song and dance about it.”
Pressed further, Lawrence defended not only the pass but the decision-making process that gets employed lap after lap in a Supercross race.
“It’s easy to point the finger,” Lawrence said. “We’re out there making decisions in a split millisecond. People have all month to pay their phone bill and they still can’t do that on time.
“We’re making decisions at such a fast reaction [time with] adrenaline. … I’m not just saying it for me or Haiden. I speak for all the guys. No one is perfect and we’re under a microscope out there. The media is really quick to point a finger when someone makes a mistake.”
The media is required to hold athletes accountable for their actions. They are also required to tell the complete story.
