2025 NASCAR Cup Series playoff grid and seedings, explained<\/a><\/p>\nBuescher crossed the finish line seventh after battling for the lead and the win in the final two laps. He was the second driver in line on the bottom with two laps to go, but on the bottom of a three-wide battle off Turn 4 as the field surged forward.<\/p>\n
Justin Haley and Buescher led the bottom lane on the final lap. Haley, however, got a run off Buescher\u2019s bumper and surged off Turn 2, opening a gap for Cole Custer to fill. Buescher followed Custer\u2019s back bumper across the finish line with the field three-by-three behind winner Ryan Blaney.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d have done something different. I don\u2019t know what right now, but obviously, we\u2019re not in victory lane,\u201d Buescher said. \u201cI\u2019m really proud of everyone on this team. This Fifth Third Mustang was so fast tonight, handling was great, it pushed so well. Ultimately came up a little bit short.<\/p>\n
\u201cScott [Graves, crew chief] said it best on the radio after the race: it doesn\u2019t define our season. We\u2019ve had a great year, it\u2019s just that we haven\u2019t gotten that last little bit of detail right. Now we\u2019ve got 10 races to go win a few and go upset one of these rounds again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buescher went winless through the 2024 regular season, missed the postseason, but then won at Watkins Glen. It was the second race of the first round, and Buescher was the first of three drivers who would play spoilers in postseason races. The hunger and determination are all the same to go do so again.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the plan, we\u2019re still racing,\u201d Buescher said. \u201cThere are lots of opportunities left. We\u2019ve got a lot of good racetracks for us. So I\u2019m excited to go put some good ones down and go put some trophies up on the shelf and try to do better on the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris Buescher had a chance to win Saturday night at Daytona International Speedway. He had a chance to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106955,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[425,99],"class_list":["post-106954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}