If Chris Buescher is walking around as if he was just hit by a truck, asking himself “What the heck just happened?”, there’s a good reason.
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It was just last week at Watkins Glen that Buescher finished an impressive third place. He left the upstate New York road course in a fairly good place as far as his playoff chances. But to show how quickly fates can turn fickle, Buescher finished a disappointing 30th in Saturday night’s race at Richmond Raceway.
Even worse for Buescher, Austin Dillon won the race, punching his own entry ticket to the upcoming Cup playoffs.
Now, just one week after thinking he would still qualify for the playoffs on points, given that he has not won a race this year that would give him an automatic berth in the 10-race post-season, Buescher is faced with a must-win situation in the regular season finale at Daytona.
In other words, he has to race his way into the playoffs and the only way he’ll be able to do so is to win at the Big D, no ifs, ands or buts. Win, and he’s in. Fall short and he’ll miss the playoffs for the second straight year and for the eighth time in the last nine seasons.
“Just a bad day,” Buescher said about his Richmond performance. “We just weren’t very good. That just was not competitive enough.
“And I have no clue where we even finished at this point, but obviously it doesn’t really matter. We’re in a must-win heading into Daytona, which is a terrible spot to be in for a plate race. I know we’ll be fast, but so many wild and random things can happen.”
Pros and cons for Buescher
On the plus side, Buescher has a good record at the 2.5-mile tri-oval in central Florida: in 21 career starts there (19 on the speedway itself, two others on the road course), Buescher has one win, six top-fives and 10 top-10 finishes.
On the minus side, Buescher was arguably the best prospect for the three-driver Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing lineup to make the playoffs. Now, Buescher finds himself in the same position as his two teammates who are below him in the Cup standings, Ryan Preece and Brad Keselowski, in that they all have to win at Daytona, and only one can, which means two of the three will miss the playoffs.
Or if none of the three drivers win at Daytona, RFK Racing will miss the playoffs without even one representative in the running for the Cup championship.
Still, Buescher remains optimistic about his chances: “We won it before (at Daytona), so we’ll certainly regroup from this one, head to that one and be ready to go.”
