First, rain delayed the running of the Geico 500 from its oringally-scheduled Sunday date to Monday afternoon. Then, a mide-race rain delay and a caution with three laps remaining in the 188-lap scheduled distance when Jimmie Johnson spun as a result of contact from Kevin Harvick sent the race into overtime, extending it to a 191-lap distance. When the checkered flag finally waved Monday evening, Ryan Blaney was the victor for the second-consecutive time at Talladega Superspeedway.
The win was Blaney’s fourth-career NASCAR Cup Series victory but his first of 2020. It also was team Penske’s eighth in the last eight races at Talladega.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. played a supporting role in a photo finish Sunday, taking runner-up honors to Blaney. Aric Almirola slid sideways across the start/finish line for the final time to finish third.
As Almirola slide across the line, Erik Jones was hitting the wall en route to a fifth-place finish.
“I just kind of blocked, just trying to block the best we good,” Blaney said. ”Ride the top, ride the bottom. The 20 [Jones] got to my outside, and I tried to go up there to slow him down, and I’m not sure. I don’t know; three-wide, I hate that I hit him, but just kind of trying to beat and bang to the line and things like that. We just edged it out, but I’m really proud of this whole Menards/Sylvania Ford Mustang team. It’s been a cool year, so far, and I’m really excited to get our first win of the year at a cool place. Thank you everybody for coming. I appreciate it you sticking around. That was a lot of fun.”
The incident near the front of the race field at the end was one of two on the final lap. The other involved cars in the back half of the race field.
Denny Hamlin was the other top-five finish. He recovered from going a lap down in the first third of the race to finish fourth.
“We had a good Camry; we just ran out of fuel, there, at the end and had to pit with just a few laps to go,” Hamlin said. But, luckily, the caution came out, and some other guys in front of us ran out of gas, so we were able to get a few more positions and race to the finish. Overall, it was a good day, and our car had good speed. Got into the wall, there, early in the race, and we were able to rebound from that. The Talladega spring race hasn’t always been the best one for us, so we’ll take this fourth-place finish and get outta here.”
The Team Penske trio of Blaney, Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski dominated throughout the race, with Blaney leading a race-high 63 laps. Logano was the only other driver to lead over 20 laps, running up front for 33 laps. By the checkered flag, though, Logano was in 17th position and Keselowski 19th.
Despite the Penske team dominance, none of the team’s drivers managed a stage-one or two win. Instead, rookie Tyler Reddick won the opening stage and Stenhouse the second.
Logano led nearly half of the first stage, leading 29 laps of the first 60. In the opening stage, the Penske teammates ran together in a draft, challenged primarily by the Joe Gibbs Racing duo of Hamlin and Kyle Busch. One of their teammates, Martin Truex Jr., started on the pole, with Hamlin and Busch in the second and third positions on the starting grid, but after leading the first four laps, Truex fell back through the field early, thinking he had a tire that was going flat.
Hamlin led 16 laps in the first stage, but pitted with five laps remaining in the stage because of a flat tire. After going a lap down because of the stop as rain brought out a caution and, then, a red flag. When the track was dried and racing resumed, Hamlin got back on the lead lap by taking a wave-around ahead of the restart for stage two.
The race was still under the weather-related caution as Reddick took his stage win.
Blaney, then, dominated stage two, leading 46 of the 60 laps that made up the stage. Busch challenged him early in the stage, but Stenhouse was Blaney’s closest competition in the final 15 laps of the stage. Stenhouse led four laps of the second 60 for his stage win.
Multiple cautions in the final 68-lap stage resulting in varying pit strategies, often with some drivers staying out, some pitting for fuel only, some taking only two tires and others taking four. One of those cautions, on lap 133, involved Chase Elliott, winner of last year’s Geico 500.
The seventh caution of the race, coming just past lap 140, put several drivers in fuel conservation mode for most of the remainder of the race, Blaney included.
“We were riding, there,” Blaney said. ”We came back in and topped off, and we were just riding around until maybe 12 to go. I was waiting for Kevin [Harvick] to kind of go, but he had to save more than I did, so we just kind of had to get going. You’re just biding your time and hoping you saved enough. There’s enough information in there nowadays where you do save enough, but it was a lot of fun. Thank you everybody for coming out. I appreciate it.”
Chris Buescher finished sixth, and Alex Bowman was seventh. John Hunter crossed the start/finish line backward but posted a career-best eighth-place finish.
“We had a really great run in our #38 Death Wish Coffee Ford Mustang today,” Nemechek said. “I really thought we had a shot at it at the end, there, but I’m still proud of our entire team’s efforts. When we fired off, we were kind of tight, and then, we had that tire go down in the second stage, but we managed to come back from it and battled into the top-10 by the end. I wish we would have won that thing, but a P8 finish at Talladega is still good for us, and I want to thank everyone on the team for their support. I’m looking forward to giving Death Wish Coffee another chance at the checkered flag at Pocono.”
Kurt Busch and Kevin Harvick rounded out the top-10.
Hamlin and Jones’ JGR teammates Truex and Kyle Busch were outside the top-20 at the finish, with Truex in 24th, and Busch 32nd after making an unscheduled pit stop for a flat tire on lap 149.
