(NASCAR)—Chase Elliott thought, “I pretty well blew it” when he drove his car nose-first into a tire barrier on the Charlotte roval while leading. But Elliott roared from 37th with 43 laps left, got past Kevin Harvick with five to go and finished more than three seconds ahead.
The “roval” is the traditional Charlotte mile-and-a-half banked track but a road course that snakes through the infield that extends the length of the track to 2.32 miles.
Alex Bowman, in another amazing run, also got past Harvick to finish second. Bowman spun on the first lap and was dead last, 40th, after that incident and a pit penalty. At one time he was 29 points behind the cutoff line for advancing into the next round of playoffs. His drive left him inside the bracket by five points.
Clint Bowyer, (in the chicane) who started the race outside the cutoff line finished fourth and will be in the field of twelve for the next three-race round. The track had installed a new chicane for this race, much tougher than the one used in the first race on the roval last year.
Four drivers fell out of the championship run-off: Aric Almirola, Ryan Newman, Kurt Busch, and Erik Jones. The next round of three races will cut the contenders from twelve to eight.
(INDYCAR)—IndyCar champion Josef Newgarden gave several of NASCAR’s top drivers a look at something they’d never seen before—and Indy car at speed. Newgarden drove his car for several high-speed laps on the roval Friday. Clint Bowyer, who drivers for former IndyCar champion Tony Stewart, had never seen an Indy car in action. “The damn thing looks like the Space Shuttle,” he said. “This is really cool.” Indy cars raced on the regular oval for three years with its last race in 1999.
Newgarden drives for Roger Penske, the owner of the cars driven by Joey Logano, the defending NASCAR champion. The run at Charlotte prompted talk of whether there would ever be an IndyCar/NASCAR double-header weekend at the track. “Why would you not want to have that double on a weekend?” asked Newgarden. “To be able to be a little closer to them and vice versa for us, I think it would be a win-win for all of us.”
(FORMULA 1)—Lewis Hamilton has moved closer to his sixth F1 championship with his win at the Russian Grand Prix. But some of the focus on his victory was overshadowed by continuing controversy within the Ferrari team. Ferrari had planned for Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel to work together to keep Hamilton from taking an early lead.
The strategy went sour when Vettel got the lead and refused team orders to let LeClerc past him.
(Photo credits: Tyler Stropp, NASCAR Digital Media; IndyCar).
