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2017 Team Reviews: Front Row Motorsports

Landon Cassill and David Ragan will not be teammates in 2018. (Getty)
Landon Cassill and David Ragan will not be teammates in 2018. (Getty)

With the 2017 season firmly in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to reflect on what happened. What else are we going to talk about?

We start with Front Row Motorsports.

LANDON CASSILL
Points Position: 31st
Stage Points: 0
Wins: 0
Top 5s: 0
Top 10s: 0
Average Starting Position: 29.4
Average Finish: 26.5

Highlight: Cassill’s best finish came in the Daytona 500, when he finished 16th. He was 19th at Daytona in July. Those were his only two top-20 finishes.

Lowlight: Cassill crashed in practice at Michigan in June. His backup car, uh, didn’t have the same speed. The car wasn’t even in the same zip code. After starting 36th, Cassill finished 32nd, four laps down.

Cassill doesn’t have a ride for 2018 after Front Row decided it wouldn’t retain his services. A veteran of the Cup Series who is 29 in 2018, Cassill has a long career ahead of him if he can keep finding rides. We’re wondering if finding a good team in the Xfinity Series (sponsorship pending, of course) would be the best move for his career.

DAVID RAGAN
Points Position: 30th
Stage Points: 9
Wins: 0
Top 5s: 0
Top 10s: 3
Average Starting Position: 29.0
Average Finish: 24.9

Highlight: All of Ragan’s top-10 finishes came at restrictor plate races. It’s almost like there’s a trend in NASCAR where lower-tier teams get their best finishes of the season at plate races. Maybe we should investigate that.

Anyway, Ragan was 10th at both Talladega races and finished sixth at Daytona. Talladega and Daytona are the only two tracks where he’s won at in his Cup career.

Lowlight: We’ll go with Ragan’s 38th-place finish at Indianapolis. With all the absurdity that happened during the Brickyard, the race was a prime opportunity for a good finish. Yet Ragan only made it 56 laps before he was out of the race because of a crash.

Ragan is sticking with Front Row in 2018 and there’s no reason to expect anything different. He’ll run well at plate tracks if he doesn’t get crashed, will over around 25th-30th everywhere else and will end up in the same neighborhood in the points standings at the end of the year. Since finishing 13th in the points standings in 2008, Ragan has finished 23rd-33rd in the points standings every year. Many other drivers have been booted from their rides for points finishes in that vicinity. Ragan keeps on chugging.

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of Dr. Saturday and From the Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!