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Rookie Pocono winner Buescher fogs up the Chase

[August 02, 2016] By Jonathan Ingram, The Sports Xchange

How often does the plot thicken in NASCAR's Chase for the Championship -- because of fog?

When a misty cloud settled over the Pocono Raceway on Monday afternoon, it shrouded rookie Chris Buescher with the laurels of his first career victory in one of the biggest upsets in NASCAR history.

Only the track known as the Tricky Triangle could produce a finish worthy of the Bermuda Triangle. There were 39 cars running prior to the final round of pit stops; only two stayed out. The first would be the winning Ford of Buescher and Front Row Motorsports, which ended a 118-race losing streak when the race was called 22 laps short of the regulation distance.

The rookie followed the pit strategy of veteran crew chief Bob Osborne and won a gamble that fog -- not visible on weather radar -- might roll in before the team needed to roll down the pit road for tires and fuel. Sure, there was some luck involved, because other teams with more to lose in terms of the points standings pitted in front of Front Row. But Buescher, a 23-year-old Texan, and his veteran crew chief deserved their suddenly heroic status.

Early in the race, Buescher dodged the sideways slide of fellow rookie Brian Scott heading into the Tunnel Turn, escaping with a cut tire and a damaged fender that had to be repaired by his pit crew. That hairy moment saved the alternately sunny and overcast day for Buescher.

Overshadowed for much of the season by fellow rookies Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney, who race for the better funded teams of Hendrick Motorsports and the Wood Brothers, respectively, the undermanned Front Row team suddenly finds itself as the only winner in the four-man group, including Scott.

It's not as if the always heady and now gray-haired Osborne got lucky with his strategy call, one also made by the third-placed team of driver Regan Smith and Tommy Baldwin Racing. In 2011, he guided Carl Edwards and their Roush Fenway Racing team to a dead heat with Tony Stewart in the Chase, losing the title on the tiebreaker of victories. In 2012, Osborne had to step down from his crew chief role into a management position while battling an undisclosed illness. Since Buescher is under contract to Roush Fenway, when the deal was made to place him in the Sprint Cup series with Front Row, it included Osborne.

Osborne inherited a driver who has done nothing but win since arriving at the super-speedway level of stock car racing. Second-place finisher Brad Keselowski of Team Penske was asked earlier in the weekend what a driver has to do to break into the Sprint Cup. His answer described the relatively humble and quiet Buescher, who is not by chance under contract to Roush Fenway.

Keselowski added Monday, "He makes the most out of each and every opportunity, and that's gonna take him a long ways in his career, and he and his team did that today. So they get a lot of credit for that."

The Prosper, Texas, driver has done nothing but prosper since his first ARCA season in 2011. He won three of the last four races that season to take the rookie title before returning in 2012 to win four races and the championship.

In his first year with Roush Fenway in 2014, Buescher was third in the rookie race in the Xfinity Series, then won the championship last year with two wins, beating back the challenge of the more heralded Elliott, among others.

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If nothing else, Buescher suffers from a lack of name recognition, which can derail sponsorship opportunities and bigger budgets -- the kind Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and former Daytona 500 winner Trevor Bayne enjoy on the Cup team at Roush Fenway. Buescher effectively toils on Jack Roush's taxi squad.

"This is going to stir up the whole year," Buescher said during the indoor celebration and impromptu victory lane due to the threat of lightning. Given that Front Row remains six points short of the top 30 necessary to be included in the Chase, the team likely will be stirred to more consistency over the next five races, starting with the round on the road course at Watkins Glen, N.Y., on Sunday.

"We've got a lot of momentum," said Buescher, who ordinarily is racing against drivers in similarly underfunded rides like Cole Whitt, Josh Wise, Matt DiBenedetto and Michael McDowell. "We just need to keep clicking off these top-15 finishes."

It is those looking to make the Chase on points or with an upset victory who have been shaken by Buescher's victory. That includes Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is winless and continues to fall in the standings while recovering from concussion-like symptoms as Jeff Gordon subs for him.

Given the reminder of Brad Keselowski's huge head-on collision with the Turn 1 barrier at Watkins Glen during testing last week, Earnhardt and his doctors may decide to sit out another week rather than risk the crash angles at the upstate New York road course, which Keselowski called the Cup series' most dangerous.

With five races remaining in the regular season, Monday's finish threw a cloud over the Chase standings. Absent a second upset road-course victory this season at the Glen -- following Tony Stewart's pit-strategy win at Sonoma Raceway -- only four drivers will make the Chase on points. Coming out of Pocono, Austin Dillon, Ryan Newman, Elliott and Jamie McMurray remain above the de facto cut line.

Kyle Larson and others hoping to get into the postseason on points may have been bumped by a driver who is not yet even in the top 30. Kasey Kahne, Bayne, Blaney and Earnhardt are in that group.

The 2016 season is thus one weird chapter away from being considered wacky, starting with Stewart's oddball back injury and then his win at Sonoma, Earnhardt's unexpected concussion problems and now Buescher's fogged-in finish at Pocono.

Stay tuned. Watkins Glen, where AJ Allmendinger and Marcos Ambrose previously scored upsets, is known to produce unexpected moments of its own.

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