To every fan who complains that the same drivers win all the races: Once in a great while, the Walter Mitty-esque tale of a Chris Buescher occurs, rare and unexpected.
Buescher won the Pennsylvania 400, which was rained out on Sunday and concluded by fog—fog!—on Monday.
After the pall fell over Pocono Raceway with 138 out of a scheduled 160 laps completed, the driver of the unfamiliar car at the front of the field was Chris Buescher, the reigning NASCAR Xfinity Series champion, not his older cousin, James Buescher, who won the Camping World Truck Series title in 2012.
It has become easier to tell one Buescher from another.
"Pretty wild day," 23-year-old Chris said in the winner's media conference. "Pretty eventful weekend."
Now Buescher can make the Chase, which theoretically gives him a chance at the Sprint Cup championship. Those odds are no greater than winning at weird, wonderful Pocono Raceway, where the championship scenario was suddenly...triangulated. Or something.
The ending of the race was obscured—literally. The spotters couldn't see the turns—or the straights, except for the first one. As noted above, Pocono has three. It's a triangle. For drivers other than Buescher and Regan Smith, who finished third, it was a devil's triangle.
With weather closing in—the expectation was rain, not gloom—Buescher assumed the lead by remaining on the track while others pitted. Smith moved into third, with Brad Keselowski between them.
Enter...the...fog.
"When you are a small team, you've got to take those opportunities when you can," Smith said to NBC Sports afterward.
Meanwhile, the big names dratted luck and cursed fate.
"It's frustrating," fourth-place finisher Denny Hamlin said, "but it's mountain weather. We're up here in the mountains, and stuff comes and goes."
Naturally, Kyle Busch would have preferred to forge on, zipping through the murky fog sight unseen:
I thought it was fun. The spotters said, 'Hey, I can't see,' and I'm, like, okay, fine, whatever, let's keep going. I think all of us can pretty much handle ourselves. We're not idiots, but occasionally, we do look like we are. I guess you've got to play it safe when you're around all of us out there.
Protected by NASCAR from himself, Busch finished ninth.
No race driver has ever benefited from a miracle he didn't deserve—not in his mind. Buescher said:
Yeah, we were sitting there and kind of just waiting for everything to happen the way it's going to. To be quite honest with you...we've had some awful luck this year, and a lot of things have not quite gone our way, and I was trying not to get my hopes up, because I knew, as soon as I would have, that fog would have rolled on out and we'd be restarting again.
By the way, Buescher isn't in the Chase just yet.
He must reach the top 30 in Cup points over the next five races. The victory put him within six of that requirement. When Tony Stewart won earlier this summer in Sonoma, California, reaching the top 30 was almost a foregone conclusion. Stewart had missed eight races due to injury. Buescher's current standing of 31st was compiled over all 21 races to date.
The victory was Buecher's only top-10 finish this year. His average finish is 27.8.
The highest finisher driving a really fast car was Keselowski, who had made some remarks in a Friday media conference that loomed large:
I think the irony is, when we started this weekend on Friday, I came in here (the media center), and somebody asked about how do guys trying to break in get anywhere, and I said the key is to make the most of your opportunities, and Chris (Buescher) is a master of that. He makes the most out of each and every opportunity, and that's going to take him a long ways in his career, and he and his team did that. They get a lot of credit for that.
When ownership dubbed Pocono the "Tricky Triangle," the trick was supposed to be the layout, not the outcome.
For all the other drivers jockeying for a position in the Chase, Buescher's victory sent a chill down the spine. Provided he makes the top 30, he and Stewart will boost the Chase qualifiers to 12 based on winning races this year. That leaves only four more spots with five races to go.
Provided those five races yield no more first-time winners, four drivers are still eligible to make the championship race-offs (they don't really play, after all) on points. The possibility that someone else will win—and that someone is outside of what now is effectively the top 14 in points—makes the Chase a moving target for drivers forced to qualify on points.
At the moment, Jamie McMurray is in. Kyle Larson and Kasey Kahne are out. What if AJ Allmendinger wins on Sunday at Watkins Glen? What if Dale Earnhardt Jr., sidelined by concussion, returns to win one of the remaining regular-season races? What if another stunning trick of miraculous fortune occurs?
All hell breaks loose. A good portion of it already has. Buescher, who is from Ponder, Texas, has given fans, other teams and other drivers much to ponder.
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All quotes are taken from NASCAR media, team and manufacturer sources unless otherwise noted.