What a wild turn of events in the early going of Sunday’s Drydene 400 at Dover International Speedway.
Two of the 12 drivers still vying for a championship are behind the wall before the real race for the win even began. For Joey Logano, he suffered a broken axle before the green flag of the race.
After stressing earlier in the weekend, that he didn’t want to leave Dover behind the eight ball, Logano will do just that.
After entering the day 29 points ahead of the Round of 8 Cutoff, Logano’s day went south in a hurry.
For Chase Elliott, who won last weekend’s race at the Charlotte Roval, it looked like his day was off to a promising start. Then, all of a sudden it appeared that he had blown a motor as his car lost power.
After his team tried to diagnose the issue on pit road, they opted to push the No. 9 car behind the wall as well.
In less than 15 laps, two championship hopefuls saw their days derailed.
Logano would return to the track on lap 24. For Elliott, it looks like he may be done for the day but his team is still working.
“Just had an engine failure of some sort, unfortunately,” Elliott said. “We don’t really know what it was yet, it just quit running. It didn’t really seem like anything was off. We were making laps and then obviously had a failure. Unfortunate way to start this round, for sure.”
Logano entered the day fourth in the championship standings, and Elliott was sixth in the rankings. Now, the two drivers that have combined for five wins in 2019 are on the ropes.
