Livescore
DARLINGTON, S.C. — Chris Buescher entered last year’s Labor Day event at Darlington Raceway as a three-time winner, steaming into the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs with a flood of momentum. This season, his arrival at the treacherous, egg-shaped oval is a much different scenario.
Sunday’s Cook Out Southern 500 (6 p.m. ET, USA Network, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App) situates as this year’s regular-season finale, and Buescher’s win column is a bare cupboard. The RFK Racing driver sits just 21 points above the dividing line that separates the provisional 16-driver playoff field from those who won’t be eligible for the Cup Series championship at the end of the 500-mile classic.
The year-over-year contrast isn’t lost on Buescher, who noted this season’s number of playoff-clinching winners — 13 — as another surprising factor for his current plight.
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“In a way, I guess,” Buescher said when asked if he was surprised by his current spot. “We’re third of the cars without a win on points. I think that’s probably the biggest surprise is that there have been as many different winners this year as there have been. On the flip side, we’ve had a lot of speed this year. We’ve been really close at a lot of races. We just haven’t sealed the deal. That’s been very frustrating at times because that was one of the the bigger goals we had on this season was to make sure that we fired off with the potential that we had around this time last year. And we did. It was good to go to a race track and have speed at types of race tracks that, honestly, we just haven’t been very good at in the past. And we were good at short tracks and intermediates and road courses are still really strong for us. All those things were going well.
“We just had a couple of runner-ups and very near-misses. So I think that it’s been a great year, we just don’t have any trophies on it yet. We didn’t expect to be in this position, and unfortunately, it’s where we’re at, but I am pretty confident in what we’re able to do at Darlington and what we’ve had as an organization this year at RFK that as long as we do everything we need to, we’re going to be in good shape.”
Protecting that points advantage will be a premium at one of NASCAR’s most demanding tracks, but Buescher has enjoyed a measure of solid performance in his most recent efforts here. Buescher placed his No. 17 Ford third in last year’s Southern 500, and he was in victory contention in the Goodyear 400 back in May at the 1.366-mile track before a scrape with Tyler Reddick thwarted his afternoon and knocked both from the running.
The standings will be a point of awareness on Sunday, but Buescher hopes a crown-jewel win will be the playoff springboard that the No. 17 team needs.
“I had a chance to win this race last time we were here and ended up in one of my less highlight-worthy moments,” said Buescher, who seethed as he confronted Reddick on pit road post-race in May. “For us, it’s how do we come in and win this race? How do we be in contention to win this race? I think I just don’t like to be a points racer. I’m aware of our situation. I feel like we can come out here and do what we’ve been doing every week, bringing fast race cars to the track. But a lot of times, I feel like we’ve had speed to compete for wins and then days that we need to execute a little bit better all around. For us, that’s kind of the same thing we’ve got looking at us for this go.
“We’ll pay attention. It’s something we started probably around Pocono time, just aware of the cars we’re racing if they have catastrophic or bad days. Just know what that means for us. And if you do have to be a little more aware of your situation, we can pay attention to that. But ultimately I want to be in contention to win this race and close the deal out that way and not worry about any of the rest.”
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Buescher has come close to winning this year — at some points, agonizingly so. Besides his Darlington downturn in the spring, he has been a runner-up twice in the regular season, including a sliver-thin 0.001-second defeat to Kyle Larson at Kansas Speedway in the closest finish in Cup Series history.
Those close calls have stung, Buescher says, but he’s not spending that reflection by fretting about the what-ifs.
“We’re on this weekend,” Buescher said. “All that is stuff that hurts and will when you do stop to look back at it, but ultimately it’s not anything that’s changing our situation right now and would really be a distraction at this point. There’s no changing it, right? So definitely things that you look back on, and we’ll clean up as a team. Things I can clean up as a driver and do differently. And then just situations that certainly could have gone better. We’re focused on this weekend now.”
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