NASCAR's 2018 season produced the most surprising moments seen in years and the Ford 400 weekend ended the season in appropriate fashion with an eye-popping affair won by Joey Logano.
Among the stories of 2018 is the disbanding of Barney Vissar's #78 team - and a striking aspect of the team's closure may have been overlooked in most analyses, as the indication is Joe Gibbs Racing vastly raised the price Furniture Row Racing had to pay to maintain its equipment deal with JGR - a practice JGR itself anticipated in 1995 when it won three races and began building its own engine shop to get off the Hendrick Motorsports engine dole before Hendrick - as that team had done to Bob Whitcomb Racing five years earlier - cut them off for outrunning his house cars.
If this is the case it's the kind of political backstabbing that is gross for motorsports, a sport where inter-team cooperation is a time-honored act of professionalism - as the late Chris Economaki had noted over his career, the sportsmen team owners who fielded cars at Indianapolis were indeed sportsman before the influx of the more ruthless types that permeated Indycars in the 1970s and onward. It is also bad business for JGR which drew immense engineering benefit from its deal with Furniture Row; in the three seasons FRR was part of the JGR effort, JGR won 29 races entering Miami alongside Furniture Row's sixteen wins.
The upshot is Truex and Furniture Row got the last laugh, beating all of JGR's Toyotas - notably the car Truex will drive in 2019, the #19 now vacated by Drive For Diversity washout Daniel Suarez - and slicing it out with Logano in some of the most spirited racing of the season. The lead officially changed nine times in the last 120 laps, but that stat is an undercount as Truex and Logano - their ugly Martinsville set-to got replayed on numerous occasions - sidedrafted for the lead for numerous laps. That they raced each other clean after Truex's angry trash talk after Martinsville was a surprise no doubt to many - and a sign of professionalism the sport has needed in greater quality and quantity.
Professionalism on display at Miami was a strikingly overlooked but appropriate salute to the driver considered NASCAR's greatest. David Pearson was the professionals' professional and his passing before the weekend made for the saddest of goodbyes. Here we see his 104th Winston Cup win, the 1979 Southern 500 subbing for injured Dale Earnhardt in Rod Osterlund's Chevrolet.
In racing as in life there are always nits to pick and Monday Morning Quarterbacking or Crew Chiefing is inevitable. The Xfinity Series championship was won by Tyler Reddick but the points as tabulated without a playoff format show Daniel Hemric as the "true" champion. The Cup side has now run fifteen "Chase" playoffs and this is the ninth time the wrong champion was crowned as Kyle Busch wins the 2018 title based on the season-long format - as well as given his eight wins, tied with Kevin Harvick's eight wins, the most of anyone this season. Aric Almirola - fifth in "Chase" points - finishes 12th in the "true" title.
That the Chase format has missed the boat so often helps explain why the sport's popularity has shrunk as it has. This 400 is the closest the sport has yet come to recapturing the beloved 1992 Dixie 500 championship chase energy, and there has never been need for a playoff format, long proven unworkable for motorsports.
*****
There was some grumbling online about this race being "the end of an era" with the NA18D draft-duct package coming in 2019 - the irony is the spirited slicing for the lead showed why the sport needs the NA18D package; the fight for the lead would have been even more epic with the draft kicking in.
There was also the expected questioning of NASCAR honcho Steve Phelps about the 2020 schedule and the potential for more short tracks and a reduction of the "cookie cutter" big tracks - seemingly no one as usual remembering the short tracks the three major league divisions now have do not draw well enough to justify any relevant schedule change - weaker completion, markets, and crowds, this is what the short tracks in fact are. This race also illustrated the fundamental superiority of superspeedways with intense racing without the gratuitous slam-bang stupidity illustrated at Martinsville.
*****
As always happens in racing there was the majority who have little to nothing worth remembering from this season. Brad Daugherty's team, Richard Petty Motorsports, Wood Brothers Racing - naturally affected more than everyone else by David Pearson's passing - are three teams whose 2018 went nowhere. Chase Elliott and Austin Dillon won this year but their teammates were irrelevant throughout, as was Chevrolet in general despite the four wins and strong efforts by Kyle Larson. The Camaro was quite simply a poor racecar and Chevrolet's program is screwed up and in need of a major cultural change - one remembers Andy Petree's earlier missive about lack of inter-team cooperation in the Chevrolet camp. Also completely screwed up is the Roush team, winless and little better than garbage from the Daytona 500 onward.
For those teams, 2018 was a failure - and 2019 is in need of improvement for them and for a sport in general that nonetheless took an important step forward in 2018.
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