There will be a change in NASCAR’s 2017 Sprint Cup schedule.

The second round of the 2017 playoffs will be changed with Talladega Superspeedway and Kansas Speedway swapping spots on the schedule.  Kansas will host the race next season when the championship field is cut from the 12 to eight drivers.  The 2017 season will open Feb. 26 with the 59th running of the Daytona 500.

“I would say it definitely adds a different layer of pressure for the competitors; I would say it adds certainly to the weekend and to the Chase overall,” NASCAR Senior Vice President of Racing Operations Jim Cassidy said. “But at the same time it does not take away from, on the Talladega side, what the fans are going to get. To me, it’s good for the fans on either side because … no matter when you go to Talladega you’re going to see a product that is quite frankly some of the most popular racing that we’ve got on the circuit. Now with Kansas in that spot, you add another layer of complexity to a very compelling playoff format.”

Carl Edwards (19) finishes 13th (photo/Jerry Coleman)

By Bob Priddy,  Contributing Editor

NASCAR)—Columbia driver Carl Edwards saw his chance for a historic victory at the historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway vanish when his car got loose during a late-race restart after a caution period.  Edwards had started from the pole and had run in the top five during most of the race.  He and then-leader Kevin Harvick started side-by-side on the restart but Edwards (in the 19) fell back rapidly when his car had a control problem in the first turn.

Edwards rallied back to finish thirteenth.

Edwards’ teammate with Joe Gibbs Racing, Kyle Busch, outran Joey Logano on the final restart of the day to win the Brickyard 400. It’s Busch’s third win in a row, his fourth in the last five races.

Edwards had hoped to give Toyota its first win at Indianapolis. Instead, the honor went to Busch.

Joplin’s Jamie McMurray finished sixteenth, maintaining his position as the driver highest in NASCAR points without a win this year.  His points lead over Jeff Gordon improved because Gordon was involved in an early-race crash and finished 42nd, fifty-four laps down.  McMurray remains the only driver to win a race at the Indianapolis Speedway, which held its first automobile races in 1909.

NASCAR’s next race is at Pocono next week.

Carl Edwards led early, but teammate Kyle Busch took the win (photo/NASCAR)

Columbia driver Carl Edwards started NASCAR’s race this weekend in first place but it was teammate Kyle Busch who finished there.  Edwards led the first 19 laps before Busch pulled ahead of him to claim the lead for the first time.

Edwards, not known as a weekly threat to claim the pole position, started first for only the fourteenth time in his 392 starts in NASCAR’s top series.  He finished seventh, continuing a mid-season resurgence after a mediocre year so far. Edwards has had back-to-back top-ten finishes after recording only three top-tens in the first sixteen races.

Joplin’s Jamie McMurray finished 26th, a lap down,  but still has more championship points than any other driver without a win this year and is still in the hunt to be one of the sixteen drivers who will enter the ten-race Chase for the Championship.  Four-time champion Jeff Gordon finished ninth at New Hampshire and has pulled to within one point of McMurray.  If the Chase began now, they would be seeded eleventh and twelfth.

Joe Gibbs Racing’s hot streak continued Friday afternoon, when Carl Edwards won the pole for Sunday’s 5-Hour Energy 301 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

Winner Kyle Busch picked up his third win in the last four races as he continues to charge back from injuries that kept him out of the first elven races of the year.  He has seven more races to accumulate enough points to be in the top thirty in the points standings, one of the qualifications for making the Chase.

Edwards, McMurray, and their competitors run in the Brickyard 400 next week at Indianapolis. McMurray won the race in 2010. Edwards chased Jimmie Johnson across the finish line in 2008 for his best finish in the race.

Jamie McMurray (Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates)

(Charlotte, NC)–The stick and ball sports have their mid-season all-star games and so does NASCAR.   Neither of Missouri’s drivers, Joplin native Jamie McMurray and Columbia’s Carl Edwards, didn’t even come close to the million dollar check that went to eventually winner Denny Hamlin in Saturday night’s race in Charlotte.

McMurray finished 16th in the final after running 12th, 14th, 11th, and 15th in the four preliminary stages.

Edwards was 17th in the final ten-lap segment after starting slowly with 15th and 17th place finishes in the first two legs and improving to eighth and sixth places in the second two.

McMurray won the race last year.  Edwards won the 2011 race and pocketed the biggest paycheck in event history, $1,203,000.   Hamlin earned about $1.045 million Saturday nigtht.

McMurray, Edwards, and the other top NASCAR drivers will spend this week getting ready for the longest race in the series, next Sunday night’s 600-mile run.

(Indianapolis)—The field is set for the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” the Indianapolis 500, but a trio of crashes forced Indycar to make last-minute changes to the cars that ended the possibility of the fastest field in almost two decades.

Two-time pole winner Ed Carpenter crashed yesterday (Sunday) morning while preparing to qualify.  His car flipped, landing on its side. He was not hurt.   His crash was similar to two others last week as cars sorted out new aerodynamic features installed only a few days earlier.  The cars of three-time winner Helio Castroneves and Josef Newgarden flipped during crashes last week.

The crashes forced Indycar to qualify with reduced turbocharger boost to engine power and with the same body configuration they will use during the race. The steps meant Scott Dixon’s pole-winning speed of 226.760 was well below the faster laps that had been turned earlier in the day.  Castroneves had a practice lap of 233.474 mph, the fast lap at the track since Eddie Cheever ran 236-plus during one lap in the 1996 race.

The 99th Indianapolis 500 begins at 11:15 a.m. CST next Sunday.