From a distance, it looked like a perfect desert weekend for Team Penske.
One of their drivers stood in Victory Lane Sunday at Phoenix Raceway holding a trophy and smiling like a man who had just discovered the last cold beer in the fridge.
But if you wandered a little farther down pit road, you’d discover that the rest of the Penske garage looked more like the aftermath of a bar fight.
Yes, Ryan Blaney delivered the headline moment, charging from the back of the field—twice—to win the NASCAR Cup Series race in dramatic fashion. But while the No. 12 team was celebrating, the other half of the Penske empire was sweeping up the pieces of what had been promising afternoons.
The first casualty was Austin Cindric, whose day ended in spectacular and rather violent fashion during one of the race’s many chaotic restarts.
The trouble began on lap 217 as the field thundered toward Phoenix’s dogleg, a section of racetrack that routinely turns otherwise sensible racing drivers into people who believe five lanes of traffic can fit into three.
In the middle of the madness, Joey Logano attempted to give Ross Chastain a shove forward. Instead, the move launched Chastain up the track and into Anthony Alfredo, who then bounced into Cindric.
Both Alfredo and Cindric’s cars briefly achieved something NASCAR engineers definitely did not design them for: flight.
They came down hard in the outside wall, their afternoons ending immediately.
“Obviously, it’s a frustrating start with so many fast race cars and to have another one today with our Quaker State/Menards Ford Mustang,” Cindric said afterward. “The restarts get crazy here and I’m not really sure what happened other than just cars jumping right across the racetrack. I’m not sure I’ve ever jumped head-on into a wall, but that changed today.”
The wreck was especially painful because Cindric had spent much of the afternoon showing genuine speed and collecting stage points.
“A whole lot of cars going right when the cars need to be going left,” he added. “It’s just a real shame… We got points in both stages and were in desperate need of a race finish without a crash and we did not get that today.”
If that wasn’t enough Penske misery for one afternoon, things soon got worse for Logano.
The polesitter had been one of the fastest cars in the race all day. After winning the pole Saturday, the three-time Cup champion led 73 laps and looked very much like a driver capable of winning the race himself.
Instead, with 58 laps remaining, his afternoon unraveled in dramatic fashion.
Logano was running mid-pack in the closing stage when contact from AJ Allmendinger sent the No. 22 Ford spinning entering Turn 1. The spinning Penske machine collected Josh Berry, Daniel Suárez, and Chase Elliott in a multi-car crash that instantly ended several days.
Logano, Suárez, and Berry all limped their battered machines to the garage, officially ending their races and leaving them buried deep in the finishing order between 30th and 32nd.
After climbing from the car, Logano could only shrug at the sort of racing incident that tends to happen when a dozen cars attempt to occupy the same bit of asphalt at 140 miles per hour.
“It just seemed like everyone ran out of space,” Logano said. “There were two cars on the outside of me. I thought I had one on the inside and you’re trying to just merge all back together and everyone ran out of space. I got the wrong end of it.”
He also acknowledged the earlier moment that triggered the restart chaos.
“I hate that I got into Ross,” Logano said. “I had a good run there to try to slip him and he kind of anticipated and went down to the bottom and we got into each other. I just ended up spinning him, which I didn’t mean to, so it’s just not the greatest of days.”
Which neatly sums up Phoenix for Team Penske.
On one side of the garage: Blaney, a trophy, and champagne.
On the other: two wrecked race cars, a collection of bent sheet metal, and the nagging feeling that this race could just as easily have been a Penske sweep of a very different kind.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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