Upon Further Review: Kentucky

So when does it become time to wonder about Hendrick Motorsports?

Now? Or is it too soon?

Saturday’s Quaker State 400 at Kentucky Speedway was a forgettable night for the four-car team, as Hendrick Motorsports failed to place a car in the top 10 for the second consecutive race.

That’s been part of a rough month for the organization. In the last four Sprint Cup races, Hendrick has scored two top-10 finishes with a lineup that boasts Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Chase Elliott and Kasey Kahne.

To compare, Chip Ganassi Racing, Roush Fenway Racing and Richard Childress Racing each has had twice as many top-10 finishes during the same span as Hendrick Motorsports.

So what to make of that?

Consider the last four races: Michigan and Kentucky were run with an aero package that won’t be used again this season. Another race, Sonoma, was on a road course, which isn’t represented in the playoffs. The fourth track, Daytona, is one where results can be skewed by how many cars are collected in crashes.

Then factor in that Chase Elliott was eliminated in a crash at Kentucky while battling for sixth, all four Hendrick cars were involved in the 22-car crash at Daytona, and Johnson was hurt by the late caution that put Tony Stewart in a position to win at Sonoma.

In one sense, it’s easy not to take too much from the past four races. That doesn’t mean one ignores those facts or what has happened this season.

There’s a concern because Hendrick cars are not leading laps as has been customary.

Hendrick’s four drivers have combined to lead 399 of 5,202 laps this season (7.7 percent). A key reason that total is down 54.5 percent from this time last year is the strength of the Toyota teams, but those are cars Hendrick will have to beat to capture its first title since 2013 and avoid the organization’s longest title drought in more than a decade.

Leading fewer laps shows that Hendrick cars are not having as many opportunities to win races. That can mean fewer bonus points that can help a driver advance to the second round of the playoffs. It also means fewer opportunities to win a race to make the playoffs. Elliott should make the Chase unless his team dramatically falters in the next eight races before the playoffs begin. Earnhardt also should make it, but his margin for error is thinning. Kahne might have to win a race, and he hasn’t led a lap all season.

The next three weeks should provide a clearer picture on Hendrick Motorsports. This weekend’s race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway marks the final race on a Chase track before the playoffs begin.

The series then goes to Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a track that shows off horsepower and aerodynamics — areas Hendrick typically excels — followed by Pocono Raceway, a track that also highlights horsepower and aerodynamics.

While there are questions about Hendrick Motorsports after its recent showings, what happens in the next few weeks should show how close or how far Hendrick is from its competition heading toward the Chase.

21 AND COUNTING

Brad Keselowski’s victory Saturday night was his 21st career Sprint Cup victory, and it came in his 251st career series start.

Here’s how he compares with active series champions on how many races it took them to score their 21st career Cup victory.

Jimmie Johnson … 156 races
Tony Stewart … 229 races
Kyle Busch … 231 races
Brad Keselowski … 251 races
Kurt Busch … 332 races
Matt Kenseth … 431 races
Kevin Harvick … 442 races
FAST AND FURIOUS?

Saturday night’s race marked the 15th time since the start of last season that Kevin Harvick has led the most laps in a race.

He’s won four times.

Harvick finished ninth at Kentucky after having to pit late. In the five times he’s led the most laps in a race this season, he’s won once (Phoenix).

In the other races he led the most laps in a race this season:

He was collected in the 18-car crash at Dover.
Jimmie Johnson passed him on the overtime restart to win at Auto Club Speedway; Harvick finished second.
He was shuffled back on a final restart and finished sixth at Atlanta.
PIT STOPS

— Two drivers have finished in the top 10 in each of the six races on 1.5-mile tracks this season: Kurt Busch and Kevin Harvick. Busch was fourth at Kentucky, while Harvick placed ninth. Kentucky was the last race on a 1.5-mile track before the playoffs begin at Chicagoland Speedway. Five of the 10 Chase races are on 1.5-mile tracks.

— Josh Wise’s 24th-place finish was his best of the season. His previous best was 27th at Pocono.

— Brad Keselowski’s victory snapped Toyota’s three-race win streak on 1.5-mile tracks.

— After winning seven of the first 12 races, Joe Gibbs Racing is winless in the last six races.

— Ryan Newman has finished in the top 15 in six of the last eight races. He’s climbed from 19th in the points to 13th in that span.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. candidly assesses 2016 struggles: ‘Things aren’t coming as easy’

SPARTA, Ky. – More than 20 minutes after the Quaker State 400, there was only one driver still lingering with his team in the pits at Kentucky Speedway.

As a group of a half-dozen reporters stood on the periphery of the scene at the No. 88 Chevrolet as several blue and white-uniformed team members scrambled to pack up after a 13th-place finish, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and crew chief Greg Ives calmly debriefed on their Saturday night. Earnhardt animatedly gestured with his hands several times to Ives, who silently nodded with his arms crossed.

It seemed an intense dissection of a fairly nondescript finish.

But if Earnhardt is to sew up his sixth consecutive berth in the playoffs of NASCAR’s premier series, the discussion symbolizes the path forward in his second season with Ives, who guided the team to three wins last year.

“Communication, talking and sitting down,” Earnhardt said when asked how his team can fix its recent struggles. “It starts with me and Greg. Last year, it came real easy. We get along great. It’s just we’re kind of faced with some adversity. Things aren’t coming as easy on the racetrack. The car’s got speed, but the finishes aren’t there.”

NASCAR’s 13-time most popular driver took a baby step toward improvement Saturday at Kentucky with his third top 15 in five races. After falling from seventh to 13th in the points standings during a four-race stretch in May, Earnhardt’s results have stabilized during the summer, and he currently holds a provisional spot on the Chase for the Sprint Cup grid.

It’s the deepest Earnhardt has gone in a season without a victory since going winless three years ago, but he also has four runner-up finishes — three in the first seven races.

“We had a really rough May that disappointed us,” he said. “We just started off the season so good, and it just ended. We couldn’t get anything right.”

The struggles have been nowhere more evident than at the restrictor-plate tracks of Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway, where he crashed and finished last in the May 1 race to start the slump.

After that wreck, Earnhardt vowed the team would address his car’s handling problems before the July 2 race at Daytona. But two months later, nothing had improved. Complaining of handling problems for much of the race, Earnhardt finished 21st in the Coke Zero 400, bringing his average finish to 32.3 on plate tracks in 2016.

“How we’ve negotiated the plate tracks this year has been a real disappointment, because those are easily places we can go get a top 10 or a top five when we need it,” he said. “So we’ve given away 60 points at those races. That’s a lot of damn points, man, those three races. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to build another car and go to Talladega, and hopefully we’ve got the gremlins figured out and the issues we’ve had.

“But me and (Ives), we talk. We communicate. We talk, text. We spend time together during the week. We’re in meetings together.  So we’re around each other working. We’re trying to figure it out.”

It was encouraging for Earnhardt that the team got a reasonable handle on Kentucky after “we sucked on Thursday and Friday.”

NASCAR provided a break by canceling qualifying in favor of more practice time the team desperately needed.

“If you’d have told me I was going to finish 13th Friday, I’d have took it, happily,” he said. “After the way we ran (Saturday), I’m a little frustrated because I thought we should have finished a little better than 13th. We had good speed and a good car at times, but I told Greg, we have the speed, and that’s the hardest thing to get in this sport. If we can fix the little flaws — the human error that I’m doing or anyone else is doing — if we can fix the flaws that we’re creating ourselves that’s easier to do than finding true speed.”

With eight races remaining until the 16-driver field is set for the playoffs, Earnhardt remains 13th in the points standings with a 32-point cushion on the current cut line for the provisional field.

The Hendrick Motorsports driver isn’t nervous.

“Yeah, I’m good,” he said. “What am I going to do? We’re running as good as we can. It’s either going to be good enough or won’t be enough. I’m not really going to lose any sleep over it, at least at this moment.

“When we miss the Chase, it’ll be frustrating and disappointing, but we’re going to plan on not doing that. We’re going to plan on making it.”

With first top five of season, Newman nearly matching 2014 performance that led to final four

Ryan Newman had a decent car at Kentucky Speedway, but not one that would have placed him in the top five on its own.

Newman made sure to thank the person who came up with the strategy that saved him enough fuel to place him third at night’s end in the Quaker State 400, his first top five in 28 races.

“A good well-played race by (crew chief) Luke (Lambert) and all of us to get the finish that we did,” Newman said Saturday night. “We did have a good car. We just never seemed to be able to get good track position and played the fuel game there at the end, did what I thought I had to do, and with no fuel gauge or any kind of telemetry was able to make it to the end.”

After starting the night at Kentucky Speedway in 14th, the Richard Childress Racing car had an average running spot just outside the top 10 (11.80). But staying out during the final 68 caution free laps, as leaders Martin Truex Jr. and Kevin Harvick pitted, proved a worth calculation on Lambert’s part. Newman saved enough to score his first top five since Chicagoland Speedway last year, the first race of the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

“Was hoping that we were going to be the first guy that could pull that one off, not the third guy,” said Newman, whose previous best result this year was seventh at Kansas Speedway.

“It’s four places better than our best finish all year,” said Newman. “Our first top five … that’s a big deal. Proud of that effort. Leading into this stretch of races, especially where we are in the Chase, to have good points tonight, even though it wasn’t a win. It’s a small victory in itself.”

It might be small, but it could be a big sign of what the team is capable of. Newman didn’t earn his first top five of the 2014 season until the Cup series came to Kentucky in its 17th race. The team went on to qualify for the Chase and then the final four at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where it finished second in the race and the championship to Kevin Harvick.

Also like 2014, Newman entered Kentucky this year with five top 10s.

But after that 2014 Kentucky race, Newman was eighth in the points and earned four more top fives before the end of the season.

Newman’s result Saturday night has him at 12th in the point standings, the second-highest driver without a win and not qualified for the Chase. The highest is Chase Elliott, who is eighth in the standings.

“We started the season off decent but not where we wanted to be or where we thought we should’ve been,” Newman said. “We’ve still got some more work to do. We’re not leading a bunch of laps or leading the most laps in a given race and talking about how we didn’t win. We’re talking about how we can finish in the top five. We’ve got some work to do, don’t get me wrong, but I’m proud of the effort that went into tonight.”

Now Newman’s team heads to New Hampshire Motor Speedway (July 17) and Indianapolis Motor Speedway (July 24). Newman has three wins at Loudon, but none since 2011. Since then he has one top five and four top tens. Indianapolis was the site of his last win in 2013. He finished 11th there the last two years.

TONY STEWART CHASE WATCH

Tony Stewart returned from a back injury in April, and the three-time Sprint Cup Series champion is in pursuit of one of the 16 spots in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup in his final season. Here's a look at where the driver of the No. 14 Chevrolet stands in his hunt after Saturday's fifth-place finish in the Quaker State 400 Presented by Advanced Auto Parts at Kentucky, the season's 18th of 26 regular-season races.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED
The Stewart-Haas Racing co-owner/wheelman had one of his best races of the season in his 600th career Sprint Cup start, finishing fifth. It was Stewart's second top-five finish of the season; his only other finish among the top five was his win at Sonoma. Stewart started 22nd, and had enough fuel left to continue running near the front at the end.

He now sits 31 points inside of the top 30 -- which is where he needs to be in order to make the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup and compete for his fourth championship. As it stands now, he's in.

WHAT HE NEEDS
Stewart received a waiver from NASCAR for Chase eligibility. The surest way into the Chase is by winning before the end of regular season (at Richmond International Raceway on Sept. 10) -- which Stewart did at Sonoma -- and remain in the top 30 in the points standings. En route to his 2015 championship, Kyle Busch faced a similar path after missing the first 11 races with a leg injury. With the win now in the bank, Stewart can focus on reaching the top 30. He sits 30th in the standings with 248 points, 31 points ahead of  Brian Scott ’s 217 points. Stewart is 15 points back of David Ragan for 29th in the standings. 

WHAT'S NEXT
"Smoke" heads to New Hampshire Motor Speedway (July 17 at 1:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), where he has three victories. In his 33 starts there, Stewart has 14 top fives and 18 top 10s. 

BRAD KESELOWSKI WINS FUEL-MILEAGE GAME AT KENTUCKY

SPARTA, Ky. – Brad Keselowski had his mojo working in Saturday night’s Quaker State 400 at Kentucky Speedway.

Saving just enough fuel to get to the finish line, Keselowski eked out a heart-thumping victory over Carl Edwards to win his second consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race and his third at Kentucky Speedway.

But this was not the same bumpy, abrasive Kentucky Speedway where Keselowski went to Victory Lane in 2012 and 2014. This was a repaved, reconfigured 1.5-mile intermediate track fraught with treachery, especially when combined with the lower-downforce aerodynamic package in use for the race.

RELATED: Recap all of Keselowski's wins

Keselowski got to the finish line .175 seconds ahead of Edwards, who made up a deficit of more than six seconds in the final 10 laps but couldn't quite get to Keselowski's rear bumper on the final lap.

When Keselowski took the checkered flag, his fuel cell was dry. The driver of the No. 2 Team Penske Ford didn’t have enough gas to do a celebratory burnout, and he needed a push from a safety truck to get to Victory Lane.

Keselowski took the lead from Kevin Harvick after a restart on Lap 200 and held it the rest of the way, except for Lap 261, when Matt Kenseth took the top spot and immediately came to pit road for fuel.

By then, the die was cast for Keselowski, who was committed to finishing the race without another fuel stop.

"We knew the fuel mileage," said Keselowski, who won for the fourth time this year, the 21st time in his career, and became the first driver to officially clinch a spot in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. "We went out and we set a really fast pace there on that restart and were just using fuel, and then it became obvious that you were going to have to save fuel at the end, but I already used so much.

"It's a testament to our guys to have the fuel mileage that we did to be able to get back what I burnt early in the run and get the Miller Lite Ford in Victory Lane. Usually these repaves are kind of my Achilles heel, but to get a win here at Kentucky… I know it's been a good track for us in the past, but this isn't the same Kentucky, I can tell you that. 

"These cars were tough to drive today, but a good tough. This was a hard-fought battle, and I'm really proud of everybody on the 2 crew to get win number four and take that first place."

When Keselowski slowed through Turn 4 on the next-to-last lap, Edwards thought he had the race won, but in retrospect, Edwards believed he had been beaten by a cunning opponent.

"Yeah, I thought he was out of fuel coming off of (Turn) 4, but he actually did it very well," Edwards said of Keselowski, who indicated on his radio with more than a lap left that he was out of fuel. "If he didn't beat me, I'd be more impressed…

"I guess I'm impressed that he did beat me, but I don't want to be. He waited. He basically shut the car off and went right off of 4 and matched it perfectly to where I couldn't get by him down the front straightaway, and then he ran like heck through 1 and 2, and then I thought maybe he'll run out down the back straight. Man, I dove it down in there trying to catch him into 3, and I couldn't even get to him."

RELATED: Edwards discusses finish of race

Keselowski, however, said he thought he was out of gas when his car sputtered off Turn 4.

"I didn't think I was going to win the race," Keselowski said.

Harvick and Martin Truex Jr. dominated the first two-thirds of the event, leading 128 and 46 laps, respectively.

Truex had taken the lead off pit road on Lap 196, but NASCAR sent him to the rear of the field for passing Harvick, then the race leader, on the entry to pit road. For the last 68 laps, Truex drove like a madman, advancing from 23rd to as high as third before pitting for fuel and finishing 10th.

"It wasn't my night on that deal," Truex said. "It's frustrating, we had the car to beat. We came out with the lead and they took it away from us. It's just the way it goes, I guess."

Particularly perilous throughout the race were the flatter of the two corners —Turns 3 and 4 — with the entry to Turn 3 especially daunting. Ten laps into the race, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. pancaked the right side of his No. 17 Ford against the outside wall of the Turn 3 torture chamber.

Nor were champions and frontrunners exempt from calamity. On Lap 32, Jimmie Johnson spun through Turn 4 and crumpled the left rear quarter of his No. 48 Chevrolet. On Lap 53, Joey slammed the Turn 3 wall after scraping it 10 laps earlier.

On Lap 88, Ryan Blaney spun from the middle of a three-wide dilemma in Turn 3 and took the No. 24 Chevrolet of fellow Sunoco Rookie of the Year competitor Chase Elliott with him. On Lap 93, the cars of Brian Scott , Chris Buescher and AJ Allmendinger were mangled in an eight-car pileup.

Lap 194 produced the 11th caution of the race, tying the record set last year, but from a restart on Lap 200 through the finish on Lap 267, the race ran green, and Keselowski was able to squeeze 68 laps out of his fuel cell.

"We were totally out at the start/finish line," said Paul Wolfe, Keselowski's crew chief. "So it couldn't have timed out any better."

Notes: Kurt Busch ran fourth, followed by Tony Stewart , who scored a top five in his 600th career start… Greg Biffle scored a season-best sixth-place finish… Harvick came home ninth and saw his series points lead shrink to four markers over Keselowski.

IT'S CLEARLY 'SHARK WEEK' FOR NASCAR DRIVERS

Something is in -- ahem -- the water this weekend at Kentucky Speedway.

First, Kurt Busch photo bombed a Joey Logano interview by making a shark fin with his hand. (Watch that video here)

Then, during an exciting battle for the lead early in Saturday night's race, Martin Truex Jr. 's spotter hummed the "Jaws" theme while his driver hunted Kevin Harvick for the lead.

All of that shark stuff can't be a coincidence.

Any thoughts, Kasey Kahne ?

What do you say, Brad Keselowski ?

ROOKIE STALWARTS CHASE ELLIOTT, RYAN BLANEY WRECK

Sunoco Rookie of the Year candidates Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney made contact with each other and spun in Turn 3 on Lap 87 of 267 in the Quaker State 400 Presented by Advance Auto Parts on Saturday at Kentucky Speedway.

Both drivers were running in the top 10 shortly after a restart when the right front corner of Blaney's No. 21 Wood Brothers Ford made contact with the left rear of Elliott's No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet SS.

"I got put in a bad spot on the restarts a few times," Blaney said on NBCSN. "We got in the middle of (Turn) 3, someone was on our bumper, and got loose, unfortunately. We took the 24 (of Elliott) out, which was not intentional. We both had really good cars."

Elliott entered and ended the night eighth in the standings while Blaney, who came in 15th, dropped to 18th and was 24 points beneath the Chase cutoff line.

"I tried to give as much room as possible," Elliott told NBCSN. "But hey, that's racing, I guess. We'll try to go get them next week."

Elliott returned to the race on Lap 145, 57 laps down from the leaders. Blaney returned on Lap 204, 116 laps down. Elliott finished in 31st place while Blaney was 35th.

Blaney aplogized for the wreck and to No. 24 fans on Twitter after the race, taking responsibility for the collision.