It’s no secret, when you come to the four annual stops between Las Vegas and Kansas, you’re going to have to go through Hendrick Motorsports and Toyota’s in general if you want to win on these 1.5-mile tracks. They’re stared 1-2-3-4 on Sunday and had 6 of the top 8 starters at that. However, could the Ford drivers have a repeat of this race last season?

Ford drivers went 1-4 and led 85 of 267 laps that day. While they’d admit that these are not their strongest tracks, they’ve done what they had to do in these races to get by.

What happens this time around?

HMS and Joe Gibbs Racing led a combined 227 of 267 laps and went 1-2 in the race. Ford’s led a combined 40 laps. Unfortunately, all 40 were by non playoff drivers. Brad Keselowski led 38 laps in a fourth place effort and JJ Yeley the other two.

For Ryan Blaney and Chris Buescher, they manufactured top 11 results with Blaney in 6th and Buescher 11th. Unfortunately though, they each lost ground in points in the process, especially more that Blaney suffered a DQ for a left front shock that didn’t meet the overall specified length requirement dropping him from 6th to last.

Blaney despite scoring 8 stage points too lost 7 points before the penalty in going form -10 entering to -17 leaving. Now, he goes from -17 to -56 in what’s now a likely must-win scenario over the next two weeks.

“I thought we could have maybe run third,” said Blaney post race. “That was probably the best we were gonna get to, but lost some ground there on the last stop and ran out of laps to get it back. Overall, it wasn’t a bad effort. You’re trying to get every point that you can because all of them matter.”

For Buescher, he went backwards quickly. He qualified 5th but was 16th by the end of the opening stage. He was 15th after the second stage. Without any stage points and an 11th place result, he went from -3 to -23 in points.

“We got shuffled back a little bit in some dirty air and it was a struggle back there for a little bit,” he said. “We got back going and needed some longer runs and green flag cycles to sort it out and we didn’t get it that way. We were able to make some decent work out of it and get a pretty decent finish out of the day.”

Now, they each have some work to do heading to Homestead. Last year, the Ford camp had just two cars in the top 6 Rows. That carried over to the race. Out of 267 laps, Ford led 0. Ford has also only won 1 of the last 12 at Homestead now too.

However, both are actually pretty good on this track though.

Blaney finished third in 2021 and has been good at Homestead overall in both the Xfinity and Truck Series races too. If not for a mistake last year, he had another Top-5 going. He was fourth in Stage 2. He finished ninth in both Darlington races.

Buescher won Stage 1 in 2021 including 57 laps led on this track. However, contact on a second stage restart ruined his handling which dropped him to outside the top 15. Buescher is at his best on aged tracks and there’s no reason to believe he can’t win on Sunday, especially with the season that he’s having.