While 20 drivers are itching to strap in their cars and go to battle for the $1 million winner’s purse in Saturday night’s Sprint All-Star Race, 25 others who showed up at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Friday failed to make the main event.
At least a few of the names are familiar ones, too.
Among those unable to win the Sprint Fan Vote or earn one of the two transfer spots available through Friday night’s Sprint Showdown were second-place points driver Martin Truex Jr., 2014 rookie of the year Kyle Larson, Michael Waltrip Racing newcomer David Ragan and 2013 XFINITY Series champion Austin Dillon.
The biggest surprise of the bunch undoubtedly is Truex, who has recorded 10 top-10 finishes in the season’s first 11 races and is unequivocally the most pleasant surprise of 2015.
The Furniture Row Racing driver finished Friday night’s second 20-lap Showdown segment in third place — two spots from where he needed to be to secure a spot in the All-Star event.
While Saturday night won’t be the first time Truex has missed an All-Star Race, it might be his most disappointing absence from the ultra-popular, non-points-paying exhibition that showcases the sport’s biggest stars under the lights.
“It’s always disappointing, you know — especially with the season we’ve had,” Truex told FOXSports.com immediately after the Sprint Showdown. “I’ll be honest: If we had the All-Star Race anywhere but here, I’d be happy and I’d have been in a lot more of them. I don’t know. This place … it seems like I run good here once out of about every five tries. We’ve got good cars … it’s just, I don’t know. This place has kind of got me messed up a little bit.”
Making matters worse, Truex doesn’t believe his team gathered much data from the Showdown that will be useful in next weekend’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
“You’re focused on 20-lap runs,” Truex said. “That’s all you’re doing today. Next week you’re going to have to run fuel runs and things are going to be different. I felt pretty good about our car the first run. It was just nearly impossible to pass. The 42 (Kyle Larson) was ahead of me and we were a lot better than he was, and every time I’d run him down, I’d get to him and just lose the car and then lose 10 car lengths and then run right back to him and do the same.”
Ragan, meanwhile, failed to transfer into the All-Star Race for the fifth time, but conceded that missing the main event never gets easier.
“No, it doesn’t and what makes it harder when you miss is I felt like we had a chance to win (the Showdown) or to make it,” Ragan said after starting third but finishing 11th in the Showdown. “It’s one thing if you just ran 15th all day and your car was slow and you qualified poor — you can accept it a little more. But on a night like tonight where we had good speed and we had a good qualifying effort, it’s frustrating not to advance. There’s some good cars that are not going to be racing tomorrow night, but at the same time we’ve just got to learn from it and got to do better next week.”
So instead of jockeying for $1 million on Saturday night, Ragan will be watching the race on TV — a predicament he would have preferred to avoid.
“It’s not a good feeling to know that you’re not out there having a chance to win,” Ragan told FOXSports.com on pit road after the Showdown. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a heat race, an exhibition race, the Duels in Daytona or all the All-Star Race; you want to be out there running.”
Clint Bowyer, who won Friday night’s second Showdown segment to advance into the All-Star Race, has likewise missed the All-Star Race before, and thus can empathize with the plights of those who didn’t make the cut this time.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Bowyer said. (But) it’s a big deal. It is. There’s a lot of people here. Anytime you have exposure time on TV and things like that in this business, you got to be a part of that.”
But as Truex, Ragan and others can attest, things don’t always work out that way.
