Unofficial Race Results
The remnants of a smashed watermelon littered the start finish line at Nashville Superspeedway Sunday night.
Ross Chastain capped off a perfect weekend Sunday with a dominate run in the Ally 400 leading a race high 99 laps in route to his third career win, and his first of 2023. Chastain took the lead for the final time after a round of green flag stops on lap 267 and held off Martin Truex Jr. winning after a caution free 107 lap run through Stage 3 and winning by .789 of a second.
The win was notable as his Trackhouse Team considers Nashville to be its home and is moving their operations there.
“This is why every little kid out there anywhere in the world, when you get criticized, and you’re going to if you’re competitive, they will try to tear you down. You will start believing you can’t do it,” Chastain said. “You have to go to your people, trust in the process, read your books, trust the big man’s plan upstairs, just keep getting up and going to work.
“I got to tell you, a lot of self-reflection throughout all this. I had a group that believed in me, and they didn’t let me get down. They bring rocket ships and I just try to point them to Victory Lane.”
Chastain started the weekend scoring his, and the teams, first career Cup series pole on Saturday. Sunday, he led the first 42 laps in a caution free first stage that saw Tyler Reddick, who led 33 laps on the day, get by him for the Stage win on lap 45.
After finishing third in Stage 2, Chastain rallied, taking the lead again on lap 231, then for the final time on lap 267. Truex tried one last push from second in the final laps but came up short, two weeks after he won at Sonoma.
“Once we lost it, I probably made a bad move taking the bottom on a restart,” Truex said. “Just too loose in the long runs. I could hang with whoever was leading. Just could never get off the corner good enough to get a move. Just lacking side bite. Overall, just burning the rear tires off too much.
Behind Truex, Denny Hamlin, who led the second most laps on the day, 81, and won Stage 2, was third.
“I think we really had a third-place car,” Hamlin said. “The entire race I thought the 19 was better. The 1 obviously came on strong there at the end. It’s all we had with our FedEx Toyota.
“We gave ourselves a chance. Didn’t have quite a fast enough car to go and contend.”
‘I need help’, Lack of SAFER barriers becomes an issue once again
Chase Elliott was fourth and Kyle Larson rounded out the top five.
There were only two cautions outside the Stage breaks. The first came on lap 140 when Reddick came off pit road with a loose tire then spun coming back in. Reddick was penalized 2 laps and was never able to make those laps up finishing 30th.
The other caution came on the restart after the Reddick caution when Brad Keselowski in third wasn’t able to take off and slowed. Several cars checked up behind including the Ford of Ryan Blaney. Blaney’s car was hit by the Chevy of Kyle Busch and sent sliding across the grass nearing the entrance of Turn 1. His Ford slid across pit road and hit nose first into an inside wall ending in a hard hit that destroyed the front of the car.
In total 23 of the 300 laps were run under caution in a race where no leader had more than a one second lead, and the top spot was contested with three wide battles at times.
William Byron was sixth, Christopher Bell seventh, Erik Jones eighth, with Kyle Busch and AJ Allmendinger capping off the top 10.
Now, a year after he made the final Championship 4, and after a month that saw him and the Trackhouse Team struggle with finishes outside the top 20, Chastain leaves Nashville with a spot in the Playoffs, and on top of the world.
“I got to tell you, it’s just so hard at this level,” Chastain said. “It’s the best of the best. It’s where I’ve wanted to be since I was 18 years old, from studying for over 10 years just to qualify better let alone go race for a Cup race win.
“Along the way, the journey, I’m so happy that my group is here, everybody that supports me. Yeah, look, it’s a Cup win. I don’t care what happened last month, the rest of my life, it’s a freaking Cup win.”
NASCAR now heads to uncharted territory heading to Chicago for the series first street race.
Photos: NASCAR at Nashville Superspeedway Sunday June 25, 2023
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" 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, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.