(NASCAR)—Joplin driver Jamie McMurray has a rare good day at Michigan International Speedway. But his road to the final ten-race Chase for the NASCAR championship is getting narrower.
McMurray’s ninth-place finish is only the sixth time in 27 starts there that he’s finished tenth or better. He started 14th. The finish is his third top-ten this year.
Joey Logano won the race to become the tenth winner in fifteen Cup races this year. The championship chase is restricted to sixteen drivers. If there are fewer than sixteen winners in the first twenty-six races, the remaining Chase slots are based on points. McMurray, without a win this year, is fourteenth in overall points and is inside the top-sixteen by only twenty-one points.
Columbia’s Carl Edwards is safe with two wins and ranks fourth in overall points. His sixth-place finish at Michigan is his tenth time in the top ten this year.
(Photo Credit: Jayski.com, by Larry Scavnicky)
(IndyCar)—IndyCar is preparing for its longest rain delay in history—more than two months.
Heavy rains that washed out plans to race Saturday night at the Texas Motor Speedway also stopped the delayed race on Sunday after 71 of the planned 248 laps. The race is considered suspended and will be resumed on the evening of August 27.
James Hinchcliffe apparently will be considered the leader when the race resumes although Ryan Hunter-Reay’s team thinks he should be considered the leader because he came out of the pits ahead of Hinchcliffe, who was still on the track but driving slowly because of a caution flag.
The race was slowed on the 42nd lap when Connor Daly’s car swerved into the car of Josef Newgarden, causing Newgarden’s car to tip onto its side and slide along the wall with the cockpit facing the wall. Newgarden has a broken right collarbone and a small fracture of his right hand but was able to climb from the car.
The race is the first one in five years that will start on one day and end on the next. The race in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2011 was halted by rain on May 1 but completed the next day. The Texas race scheduled for September 15, 2001 did not start until October 6, delayed because of the terrorist attacks four days earlier.
IndyCar drivers Scott Dixon, Sebastian Bourdais, Ryan Briscoe, and Townsend Bell immediately left the track to fly to France where they will drive the four Ford GTs entered by Chip Ganassi in the 24-hour race. Only Dixon is a regular on the IndyCar circuit. Bell had been in the broadcast booth for the Texas race. The LeMans race is next weekend.
(FORMULA 1)—Lewis Hamilton has won his second straight race and has cut the points lead of teammate Nico Rosberg from 43 to just nine. Hamilton overcame Ferrari’s Sebastien Vettel’s first-turn bolt into the lead and survived another first-turn bump with Rosberg to take the lead when Vettel made two pit stops while Hamilton needed only one. Valttteri Bottas, in a Williams, claimed the other podium position.
Rosberg recovered to finish fifth after dropping to tenth after the first-lap wheel-banging with Hamilton.
