The YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway had minimal cautions on Sunday (10/6). However, “The Big One” did happen and sent NASCAR’s playoff race into overtime and allowed a second straight spoiler winner.
The YellaWood 500 was the second race of the 12th round of the three-race 2024 NASCAR playoffs. The remaining 12 contenders for the championship started the race with two plans. Plan one, score as many points as possible in the first two stages of the race to help advance to the next stage of the playoffs. Plan second, be there at the end of the race for a chance to win and earn automatic promotion to the next round in the playoffs.
Chris Buescher, a non-playoff driver, won the first stage of the race, preventing any of the playoff drivers from scoring the maximum points in that stage. Austin Cindrich started the race at the bottom of the list of remaining playoff drivers. Austin was able to win the second round and earn a valuable 10 bonus points for it.
The first stage had one caution flag for a two-car incident early in the race. Then the caution flew at the end of the stage.
The second round also saw an on-track incident that brought out the yellow flag. It involved six cars and forced the second stage to end under caution.
The limited number of caution periods did not make it a dull race. During the race, 24 drivers exchanged the lead 66 times. Two-wide, three-wide, and even four-wide trunks were raced at nearly 200 mph. It was surprising there weren’t more caution times throughout the race.
The biggest worry in a driver’s mind when racing big packs on super speedways is getting caught in the Big One. It’s a crash that happens and collects cars in the double digits. The “Big One” finally happened with five laps to go in the race. Austin Cindric was leading when his car was rear-ended. He lost control and spun. As a result, a total of 23 cars, more than half of the field, were involved in the wreck.
The race was red flagged for about nine minutes to clear the crash. When it got rolling again, they had to go with the green-white-checkered finish of NASCAR Overtime.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was on pole for the race restart. Ricky battled side by side with Brad Keselowski for the final two laps of the race. Brad got a push from Kyle Larson to take the lead one last time down the stretch. However, William Byron pushed Ricky back into the lead heading into the tri-oval section of the track to the finish line. William pulled to the outside of Rick and Brad was on the inside and the three pulled to the finish line.
Ricky was able to cross the finish line first in just 0.006 seconds. That equates to only feet if not inches of victory. This was Ricky’s first win of the 2024 season. It was his second win at Talladega Superspeedway and his fourth career victory in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Ricky’s other two wins came at Daytona International Speedway.
Brad Keselowski (who was eliminated from the playoffs after the round of 16) finished second. William Byron remains in the postseason and is in contention for third place. See full race results for the YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway here.
Since a non-playoff driver won again for the second consecutive week (third time in the 2024 playoffs), no playoff driver earned automatic advancement to Round 8. However, William Byron scored enough points in the race to be locked in for the next round. He also leads the postseason leaderboard. Christopher Bell leaves Talladega in second and Kyle Larson in third. See the full NASCAR playoff schedule here.
Drivers and teams head to the Charlotte Motor Speedway Road Course for the Round 12 elimination race. The Bank of America ROVAL 400 will take place on Sunday, October 13th. After the race, the bottom four drivers in the standings for Round 12 will be eliminated from the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.
Author: Buck Stevens
