Good run at RIR was too little, too late for Kasey Kahne
Kasey Kahne knew what he had to do Saturday night at Richmond International Raceway to race his way into the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
And he tried. He really did.
But Kahne, who needed to win the Federated Auto Parts 400 in the regular-season finale to make the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series playoffs, ended up sixth. That left him on the outside looking in on the 16-driver Chase field.
Denny Hamlin won the race, giving the Joe Gibbs Racing driver his third victory of the 2016 season.
“Yeah, I wanted to win, but Denny was better,” Kahne admitted. “We couldn’t have done much better than we did. We got up there because of the right pit call. We got on tires at the right time and got by those other guys around us, and then when they pitted they were too far back to get us back.
“It worked out. We would have run fourth, I think, at best. We ended up sixth after that final restart, but it was a good effort by our Farmers Insurance team. Just not quite good enough.”
The sixth-place finish was his best since he also finished sixth at Pocono in early June, more than three months ago. But it was his second consecutive top-10 run after he also finished seventh at Darlington.
That may not be the kinds of finishes Kahne and Hendrick Motorsports used to cheer about, but he hopes it’s the beginning of better days ahead -- even if he won’t be in the Chase now.
That was the message team owner Rick Hendrick delivered to Kahne after the race.
“He said, ‘Good job. Way to fight.’ And I said, ‘Thanks for giving me the last three weeks cars that were capable of fighting with.’ So that was nice for me, to have cars for the last three weeks where we can actually go and battle,” Kahne said.
“Our team is doing a good job. Our whole deal these last 10 races is trying to try to get some consistency, keep running in the top 10 and trying to win some races. But we haven’t been anywhere close to that this year. We’ve been 13th to 18th. We want to be in the top 10, the top five. These last three weeks, we have. So we want to keep pushing forward on that.”
