TALLAGEGA, Ala. — Brad Keselowski figures he was just being aggressive, down six laps and hoping some breaks would allow him back into contention. It was, after all, Talladega Superspeedway where anything can happen.
Other drivers were left shaking their heads after Keselowski spun and triggered a 14-car wreck Sunday when he was so far behind.
“Brad does a lot of smart things out there on the race track and then he does some things that make you just shake your head and go, ‘Really? How does a guy that’s a champion, that’s been that successful make such silly decisions?’” said Jeff Gordon, among those caught up with about 50 laps to go.
Keselowski said Talladega isn't a track where you give up too early and the winner typically doesn't get to the front by being passive.
“You assume something’s going to happen but you don’t know,” Keselowski said. “And that’s why you race so hard. I was one or two debris yellows from being back in the race, and I wasn’t going to give up.”
It was the second incident of the day involving Keselowski, who won at Talladega in 2012 en route to the Sprint Cup championship.
He got spun after sliding down in front of leader Danica Patrick on lap 14 as she tried to move up the track.
His own crew chief, Paul Wolfe, indicated it was Keselowski’s mistake. “We weren’t clear enough to make that,” Wolfe told his driver on the radio.
Patrick said she was trying to squeeze in between Keselowski’s No. 2 car and Gordon’s No. 24.
“I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know if it was just me coming up,” she said. “It very well could have been. I don’t know if it was him coming down. I’m not 100 percent sure but I do know that I was looking in my mirror trying to get up behind the 2 and in front of the 24 and was just about to slide into that spot, and that’s when it happened. My apologies if that was all my fault.”
But there was some grumbling from Gordon and other drivers after what happened with Keselowski later, when he seemed unlikely to make up all that ground even at Talladega.
Clint Bowyer was asked if there was some protocol when a racer is multiple laps down.
“Seems like common sense is one of your strong suits,” Bowyer told a reporter.
More on Danica's day: Patrick had her best showing of 2014 even though the performance was overshadowed by a disappointing 22nd-place finish.
Patrick found herself drifting back in the pack as a result of overheating issues. Though she made a charge through the field in the latter stages of the event, climbing as high as fifth, she continued to deal with the overheating, which eventually left her in the traditional Talladega shuffle in the closing laps.
“It was good out front," Patrick said. "I wish I could have stayed there. I was just talking about heating issues; I was getting hot a lot. I think you saw that from a lot of cars. It was a hot day here in Talladega. When you get back a little bit in the field it gets even worse. The good news is this car is going to get to go to Daytona. That is a positive. The result was not necessarily too much of a positive, but it’s going to get rolled up on the truck so that is more than a lot of people can say coming from a speedway.”
Pit stop costs Earnhardt Jr.: Afer winning the 2014 opener at Daytona in February, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his Hendrick Motorsports team were looking forward to Sunday's race.
Even though the driver of the No. 88 National Guard Chevrolet started deep in the field (30th), he began to mount his charge in the second-half of the race.
He took the lead but a gutsy call by crew chief Steve Letarte to pit backfired, and kept NASCAR’s most popular driver at the back of the field.
As the final 31 laps ticked away, Earnhardt struggled to maneuver through the draft, at one point almost losing the draft completely, before a caution would allow him to catch-up.
Nonetheless, the break wouldn’t pay off and Earnhardt found his late-race momentum on the high side stalled by Josh Wise, which evaporated a potential comeback run, resulting in a 26th-place finish, the next-to-last car on the lead lap.
“Anytime anyone jumps in front of you on the outside line, you are not going to shove them out there, especially a car like that,” said Earnhardt Jr. “I wanted to help him but it just killed us. You have to have that track position at the end and we just didn’t have it.”
Strong day for Allmendinger: A.J. Allmendinger and his JTG-Daugherty team were able to put an exclamation point next to their strong weekend after the team reeled in a fifth-place finish Sunday.
Allmendinger utilized patience early, deciding to drop from a season-best third place starting position and hang at the rear of the field, hoping to miss any big wrecks and be in contention near the end.
It worked.
As the second-half of the race wore on, Allmendinger methodically began moving forward, inching closer to the front and contending for the win, but the caution flag waived on the last lap and derailed any attempt at making a defining move coming to the checkered flag.
Other names and numbers: Reed Sorenson of Peachtree City was 34th. … Pole-sitter Brian Scott finished next to last (42nd), just ahead of Tony Stewart.
Looking ahead: The Sprint Cup Series cruises to Kansas Speedway for Saturday night's 5-Hour Energy 400. Matt Kenseth is the defending champion.
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