Most of the drivers who qualified for the Chase for the Championship in each of NASCAR’s top-three series since the Chase races started. Seriously. With this kind of bad luck, it’s surprising that they qualified for the championship races in the first place.
Really, is someone casting bad-luck spells or something? Is that what’s going on here? It is almost Halloween, and this stuff is getting kind of hard to believe.
Adding to the crazy amounts of bad luck that Chase contenders in both the and have faced thus far in the championship races, three of the eight remaining Chase drivers in the Xfinity Series wrecked with 36 laps to go in Saturday’s race at Kansas Speedway. Justin Allgaier and Ryan Reed stayed out on track, while Darrell Wallace Jr. went to the garage for the day.
Just over 10 laps after those three wrecked, Chase contender Brendan Gaughan did some landscaping in the infield. He ran back to the race car as soon as he got out of the infield care center, nearly 20 laps down. With how poorly everyone else is doing, it really did matter whether Gaughan finished or 35th.
Then, Chase contender and a dominant Xfinity Series driver this season, Erik Jones, wound up on pit road for a cut tire. He was the race leader at the time, and went a lap down on pit road. Jones finished 15th.
If you’re keeping count, five of the eight drivers left in the Chase either ate dirt with their splitters or had on-track contact within less than 30 laps. At this point, it seems like drivers would have been better off not qualifying for the Chase in the first place. This is like a bad movie plot in which nobody wins.
Oh, wait. Someone did win—the race, that is. It was , Kyle Busch.