Chase Elliott wins a sane Talladega after safety dominates NASCAR's weekend headlines

Talladega brought some natural order back to the NASCAR playoffs.

Go figure.

Of all places, it was Mayhem Superspeedway that saw the People’s Choice, Chase Elliott, cross under the checkers first and clinch a spot in the next round of playoff races, which won’t happen until passing through Charlotte’s Roval road course this coming weekend.

That, we’re guessing, could be a madhouse.

But first let’s recap the weekend in Talladega, which included a popular race winner, some high-level accusations regarding a high-level issue, and a fire. Yes, a fire.

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First Gear

We’ll get to Chase and the new playoff landscape, but we probably should start with the big-picture topic, because it might be the biggest takeaway from Talladega.

Safety, or recent lack thereof, went front-and-center again this past week when Alex Bowman withdrew from Talladega due to concussion symptoms — his single-car spin and wall contact the previous week at Texas looked fairly harmless, but obviously wasn’t.

It’s the rear bumpers of the Next Gen cars, apparently, that are causing the current problem. They were designed to take bigger hits without falling apart and needing to be replaced. It seems the engineering worked too well on that end, but as they always say, something’s gotta give.

It’s the drivers doing the giving, absorbing more of the contact than they were before. Denny Hamlin, an elder statesman among his fellow drivers, directly blamed NASCAR leadership for green-lighting a new car that appears to be lacking in the most important area — “it needs a full redesign,” Hamlin said of the Next Gen.

Chase Elliott, usually reserved on hot-button issues, suggested the entire NASCAR organization went backwards with the Next Gen, at least in terms of driver safety.

“I think it’s just super surprising to me that we allowed that to happen, but we did,” Chase said.

Second Gear

We never got the Big One, though a Lap 24 crash deep in the pack involved eight cars — mostly spinning involved, with just two cars retired after the smoke cleared.

In the late laps, as usual, everyone was glued to the action, assuming something big was coming. Turns out, the assumption was shared in at least one cockpit.

“My stomach hurts just from agonizing in the car over the wreck that I knew was going to happen,” Ross Chastain told Fox Sports afterward. “It was incredible we all made it.”

Of the four superspeedway races this season at Talladega and Daytona only one — the Daytona 500 — went beyond the prescribed number of laps due to a late wreck. There were, however, big pileups in all, at least until Sunday.

Maybe it’s too easy, but you want to tie together all the current safety concerns with the drivers’ ability to keep things together when the heat started rising at Talladega.

Considering the playoff implications, along with several drivers looking at a rare opportunity to win, the opportunity was there, but either sanity or good ol' fashioned dumb luck prevailed.

Third Gear

Now, on to the reason we’re supposed to be here.

There was no mayhem, but there was drama, and in the end we finally had a playoff racer winning a playoff race.

And it was none other than Billy Clyde Elliott, who last week slipped perilously close to the playoff bubble before outrunning Ryan Blaney to win Talladega and clinch a spot in the Round of 8, which begins Oct. 16 in Las Vegas.

“These things are so, so hard to win,” Chase said after climbing from his No. 9 Chevy. “You have to enjoy them.”

Next up? “Get ready to go to the Roval and try to grab another one,” said Chase, who will definitely be a pre-race favorite, given his road-course savvy.

After the final restart with two to go, Chase got steady pushing from fellow Chevy pilot Erik Jones, and eventually rode the outside lane past Blaney, but in the end he wasn’t too far past him. Official margin of victory: 0.046 seconds.

Unofficial margin of victory: The blink of an eye.

“It was a wild last couple laps,” Chase said.

Wild, but not messy. Also, it was Chase’s fifth win of 2022 and the 18th of his Cup Series career, tying him on the all-time list with teammate Kyle Larson as well as some former NASCAR heavyweights: Geoff Bodine, Neil Bonnett, Harry Gant, Ryan Newman and Kasey Kahne.

“That's really cool. Kind of hard to believe honestly,” Chase said.

The playoff standings after ’Dega: 1. Chase Elliott, 2. Ryan Blaney, 3. Ross Chastain, 4. Denny Hamlin, 5. Joey Logano, 6. Kyle Larson, 7. Daniel Suarez, T8. Chase Briscoe, T8. Austin Cindric, 10. William Byron, 11. Christopher Bell, 12. Alex Bowman.

Fourth Gear

The scariest moment of the weekend can’t be blamed on the Next Gen car.

Part-time Truck Series racer Jordan Anderson was airlifted to a Birmingham hospital and treated for second-degree burns before being released Saturday night. Find the replay and you’ll realize how much worse it could’ve been.

His truck lost an engine and immediately caught fire on Lap 19 of Saturday’s truck race. As Anderson’s truck was veering toward an inside retaining wall off Turn 2, he was unstrapping and taking down the window net.

As the slowed truck was smacking that wall and coming to a halt, Anderson was nearly halfway out of his window and was able to escape onto the top of the SAFER barrier as smoke and flames engulfed the truck.

In the wake of all the current safety talk, NASCAR has scheduled a Next Gen test this week at an Ohio crash-test facility. Along the way, they might want to determine how a fire could erupt so suddenly, without a crash, in one of its Truck Series entries.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NASCAR: Chase Elliott wins a sane Talladega; well, except for a fire!