Ross Chastain, who drives for a Nashville-based team, wins NASCAR Cup race at superspeedway
LEBANON – Pole winner Ross Chastain got his third career NASCAR Cup Series win Sunday night at the Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway. The playoff-clinching win is his first of the season and his sixth top-five finish of the season. He entered the race as the fourth-ranked racer on the points leaderboard.
Chastain races for Trackhouse Racing, a Nashville-based race team owned by musical artist Pitbull and former NASCAR driver Justin Marks.
"It's incredible, the thought that we won here," said Chastain of Alva, Florida. "It's mind-boggling ... Tonight we put it all together."
Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Martin Truex Jr. and Denny Hamlin rounded out the top three.
The racer known as “Melon Man” celebrated his win by smashing a watermelon onto the finish line.
"(This win) is bigger than anything," Chastain said. "It's an oval, a circle track. It's serious when you win on an oval track."
After wading through a messy second stage, Chastain took heed of a great opportunity at lap 231 and snuck past Hamlin. Chastain maintained his lead after the final pit stops of the night. Truex fought for the top spot as the field reset coming out the pit, but couldn't pass Chastain, who navigated lap traffic.
Between his prominent leading start and his closing tussle with points leader Truex, the battle for first was fairly open as Chastain hovered in contention.
Truex found himself in a familiar position when he opened the second stage with the lead. But he couldn’t hold off Hamlin, who took advantage of a chaotic second stage to steal the front position.
"With everything being the same on the cars, it just means the track position means more than anything," Hamlin said of his back-and-forth with Truex Jr. "So you gotta just battle."
Tyler Reddick, who won the first stage and started the race second beside Chastain, knocked himself out of contention with a shaky pit stop entrance when he began to lose his right rear tire. He was penalized two laps for losing his right rear tire on pit road after spinning out of control. The caution he forced quickly led to another caution, when Brad Keselowski’s poor restart sent Ryan Blaney, head on into the interior wall, ending his night.
“I don’t really know what happened,” Blaney said after the crash. “I just couldn’t get straightened out … I thought I’d be ok but I just never got back right.”
Before Hamlin took a lead, Truex was the best of three racers in a three-car struggle. Prevailing in a multi-lap battle with Chastain and William Byron, Truex earned a strong lead with a second in between him and the closest driver. But back-to-back cautions derailed his comfortable position.
Truex, who led for 50 laps, was seeking back-to-back wins. He won at Sonoma going into NASCAR’s lone break in the 38-race season.
"I could hang with who ever was leading, just could never get off the corner good enough to make a move," Truex said. "Overall just burning the rear tires too much ... got lots of speed just could never get the balance where it needed to be."
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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Ross Chastain wins NASCAR Cup race Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway
