For RFK Racing teammates of Chris Buescher and Brad Keselowski, they knew they didn’t have the speed to beat Kyle Larson (98 laps led) or Bubba Wallace (112 laps led) in a final 20 lap shootout for the win. Even Erik Jones had a faster car. With Ford’s having led 2 laps all day and 30 laps in all of the opening round, and with a race now shaping up to be won on speed, they were taking a knife to a gun fight.

For Hamlin, he had right side damage after his teammate, Ty Gibbs, got into Hamlin while Hamlin was exiting his pit stall on Lap 75. Both gave up better stage positioning to be among several drivers to pit under the late opening stage caution. Gibbs had already exited his pit stall and was riding down the middle lane. Hamlin exited and had no where to go but into Gibbs. It damaged Gibbs’ car enough to force him with an early exit in 33rd place.

Hamlin luckily didn’t seem too much of a detriment with the damage but it was enough to hamper him against Larson and Wallace.

So, on a day where tires didn’t mean a whole heck of a lot, they all pit under the caution for JJ Yeley with 25 to go. On Lap 244, they’d pit. 14 others stayed out.

Hamlin was 3rd. Buescher and Keselowski 5th and 7th at the time. They’d exit 15th (Hamlin), 16th (Keselowski) and 17th (Buescher). Without much time to rebound, would it work?

Buescher only gained 3 spots to finish 14th. Keselowski would come home 7th. Hamlin was 12th at the time of Wallace and Hamlin’s incident with 19 to go. He was 7th on the final restart with 7 to go and made it two more stops up to 5th.

While it was a net loss decision, it was one they felt they had to each make.

“At the end there we tried some strategy to make something happen and we couldn’t keep green flag conditions for more than a couple laps at a time so we bled off all the laps that we needed to do something and I ended up back there with people that were all over the place all day, running into us on straightaways and just shouldn’t have been around that group,” Buescher said.

Hamlin scored just his 2nd top 5 finish since 2019 here but 12th top 15 finish of the season and 15th top 10. He now has 97 career playoff top 10 finishes and 220 career top five’s. He’s +37 in points after scoring 10 stage points on the day too.

“Today, I thought we had a really fast FedEx Camry until we got the damage,” he said. “Once we got the damage, it just wasn’t as fast as it was before. Still, considering how much damage it had – it was a top-three car. A bunch of carnage happened there in the end, and we avoided it, so we are in a better spot than when we entered.”

Keselowski had 4 stage points but leaves +8 in the standings.

“There were big ups and downs today,” he said. “We ran in the top-10, 10th-12th most of the day. At the end there we pitted and put two tires on at the end. I think we were fourth of fifth but then they kept wrecking so much that we didn’t get a chance to take advantage of it and were only able to get back up to seventh.”

Buescher had 15 stage points, most among playoff drivers to negate the loss of 7 on track spots for pitting. He’s +22 heading to Talladega.

Hamlin can win at any given time on a superspeedway, but has had just one top 10 in his last 10 superspeedway starts. However, six Top-7 finishes in his last 10 Talladega tries also gives me reason of optimism too. He has seven straight top seven’s in the Fall race as well and has scored just the 12th most points on superspeedway’s this season though with finishes of 17th, sixth, 17th, 14th, 26th.

Buescher and Keselowski could shine. They just went 1-2 in Daytona with Buescher winning.

Keselowski was fifth in the spring race at Talladega, second in last month’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 and has won six times at Talladega, including the spring of 2021. He was also runner-up that Fall too. Keselowski has the most superspeedway points (188) and second most laps led (116) on these tracks this season with finishes of second, fifth, sixth, second in the last four.