Heading into the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, Ross Chastain claims he doesn’t have any more tricks up his sleeves.
After the Trackhouse Racing driver pulled off one of the most jaw-dropping stunts in the history of sport to advance to the Championship Four last year, it’s a fair question.
On the final lap at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway — the final race of the Round of Eight — Chastain pinned the throttle in his No. 1 Chevrolet, rode the wall through turns three and four, and shot past rival Denny Hamlin to steal the coveted playoff position.
But according to Chastain, as he prepares to take his sophomore trip into the playoffs, he’s ready to utilize a more “normal” approach.
“No more (tricks) up these sleeves,” Chastain said. “It’s just go scrap up as many points as we can and see what we’ve got at the end of each elimination race.”
Chastain is entering the playoffs as the eighth seed, with one win and an average finish of 15.3 padding his confidence for the upcoming title fight. While he may be a mid-pack driver right now — who has had a number of things go right and various things go wrong during the regular season — the Florida native is comfortable with his position.
“It does not affect how I drive off into turn one at Darlington (Raceway) during qualifying or on lap 30 of the race or lap 230 or 330. It’s what do I need to do to put my car in the best position to win, get as many points as I can, run as fast as a lap as I can,” Chastain said. “I think about the lap I’m in, what does the next corner need from me and it’s a very repetitive process of 367 times plus maybe a little overtime.”
Other than the “Hail Melon” move, the 30-year-old feels the team didn’t do “anything crazy” with their playoff strategy last year. Half of their finishes were inside the top five, with only two results worse than 13th.
In fact, one of Chastain’s main takeaways was that “it was OK to just be OK.”
He continued, “There were some races where guys are blowing tires, issues are happening and motors are blowing … just be OK and it’s going to be alright. There were times where I could have pushed harder and maybe we could have won. It would have been a high-risk of crashing, and at that moment we didn’t need that, so we just ran second and moved on.”
Though he doesn’t feel the need to blow the roof off during Sunday’s playoff-opening Cook Out Southern 500 at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, Chastain said he won’t be hiding from anything on the race track.
“We can’t reinvent the wheel this week for Darlington. We can’t reinvent it for the Roval or anything. We need to go race,” Chastain said. “That’s what we’ve done for two years and really three since a lot of us were at CGR together. We didn’t get here by accident, and it’s OK to go win some of these things. Somebody is going to.”