INDIANAPOLIS — In the finals of the Cup Series In-Season Challenge, 25th-seeded Todd Gilliland took advantage of third-seeded Ryan Blaney’s unfortunate wreck on Lap 120 to win the $1-million winner-take-all prize Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Gilliland finished 24th and Blaney was 26th.
Blaney was comfortably ahead in the race for the Challenge bounty when his No. 12 Ford turned off the nose of John Hunter Nemechek’s Toyota to ignite an accident that collected nine cars.
“It feels really good,” said Gilliland, who survived five rounds to prevail in the Challenge. “Obviously, we wish we ran a little bit better than 24th today, but we did what we had to do. Really, that was the name of our game all the way throughout this Challenge. We just barely skated by.
“We were obviously a bit lucky, but we still stuck out these races. We did the best we could, and luckily it was good enough, just barely every single round. It’s a big prize. One million dollars going to the team. That’s just massive.”
TALKING POINTS
Four races remain before the 16-driver Chase field is set.
Rotten luck continued to follow reigning series champion Kyle Larson, who maneuvered himself into a race-leading position with an early pit stop on Lap 28, only to have his strategy fall apart thanks to a blown left-rear tire 17 laps later.
Larson, coming off a 15th-place finish at North Wilkesboro after consecutive 34th-place result at Chicagoland and Atlanta’s EchoPark Speedway, fell out of the race in last (39th) place.
On a star-crossed day for Hendrick Motorsports, Chase Elliott fared little better than his teammate. Racing in close quarters with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. on Lap 60, Elliott slammed the outside wall just beyond the Turn 2 exit.
Attempts to repair the car on pit road proved futile, forcing Elliott to drive the No. 9 Chevrolet to the garage. Elliott returned to the track 41 laps down and finished 37th.
Meanwhile, Joey Logano, who was outside the top-16 looking in several weeks, followed his victory at North Wilkesboro Speedway with a third-place effort at Indy and climbed to 13th in the standings.
Logano’s teammate Austin Cindric currently holds the 16th spot, 38 points ahead of Ryan Preece.
BRIDESMAID
Christopher Bell finished second for the sixth time on Sunday. He ranks 10th in the standings after 22 races.
“This is a good second place. We’ve had a lot of bad second-place finishes,” Bell said. “This one was a good one. We were buried after qualifying. Adam did great job with strategy to get us up there. Whenever we had the restart on the second row, I was really happy with our position. Yeah, just proud of Adam (Stevens, crew chief), proud of this team. We pulled together a really good day. We’ve run second a lot. There’s been bad seconds, but this one is a pretty good one.”
NEEDED RESULT
Josh Berry has endured a challenging year of crashes and difficult races, which included news that he will not remain with Wood Brothers Racing next season.
Berry and the team had a good outing on Sunday, finishing seventh at Indianapolis. It was only Berry’s third top-10 finish of the season.
“It was a really good day. I thought we did a really good job,” Berry said. “We struggled Friday. I thought the guys did a really good job overnight for qualifying. I know we didn’t qualify like we wanted, but we had a super early draw and felt better about the car than what we qualified and I think we just executed a really good race.
“It wasn’t perfect, but we had some really good restarts the second half of the race and made some progress, and we had some really good long run pace. Overall, it was a really solid day that we needed. I’m just happy to finally get a good finish.”
