- Josh Berry’s playoff bid at Bristol ended in flames when his No. 21 Ford caught fire on lap 74, capping three consecutive last-place finishes to open the postseason.
- Berry entered the Bass Pro Shops Night Race 45 points below the cutline needing a win, and instead was sidelined before the first stage even ended.
- Crew chief Miles Stanley believes rubber buildup from a new right-side tire compound sparked the fire, an issue tied to the same tire wear Berry had hoped would work in his favor.
Three Weeks, Three Last-Place Finishes, and Now a Fire
Josh Berry’s NASCAR Cup Series playoff run ended the way it started: with something breaking that had nothing to do with his driving. On lap 74 of the Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway, flames appeared on the right front of his No. 21 Ford. Two laps later he brought it down pit road, smoke pouring into the cockpit so thickly that safety crews had to help pull him from the car while colleagues worked to put out the fire.
It was the third consecutive week Berry’s playoff bid had been undone by something outside his control, and this time there would be no recovery. He entered the night 45 points below the cutline, all but needing a win to survive into the Round of 12. Instead, his run ended before the first stage was even finished.
A Round That Never Gave Him a Chance
Berry’s Round of 16 opened at Darlington Raceway, where he qualified third only to bottom out through Turn 2 on the opening lap and spin into the garage for repairs. The following week at World Wide Technology Raceway, contact from Chase Elliott sent him spinning again, this time on lap 36. Bristol was supposed to be different. Berry said his car had the pace to make it a factor all night, right up until the smoke started rolling in.
“We started getting some smoke in the cockpit,” Berry said after climbing from the car, “and then the longer I went, the darker the smoke got. And obviously by the time we got on pit road, it was completely black smoke. So yeah, obviously something caught on fire.”
Crew chief Miles Stanley traced the cause to rubber buildup from a new right-side tire introduced for the race, material that gathered on the car’s exhaust header before spreading to the rocker panel. “The best that I can tell is it was the rubber buildup on the header that caused the fire, and then that just spread to the rocker,” Stanley said. “Once the rocker catches, you’re kind of hosed. I didn’t really see how quickly it progressed; it seemed to progress really quickly. And then, like I said, once the rocker was on fire, there really wasn’t a whole lot we could do.”
The tire wear that doomed Berry was the same variable he had hoped would work in his favor. High wear from the new right-side compound was expected to shuffle the field and open opportunities for cars that managed their tires well, exactly the kind of race that could reward a driver willing to gamble on long green-flag runs. Berry had done just that, stretching his first set of tires deep into the run and putting himself in position for a strong night, before the same tire wear that created his opportunity also created the spark that ended it.
“Just disappointing, again,” Berry said. “Our car was really good. That was going to fall right into our wheelhouse, I feel like, to have a really good night. We were able to make it pretty long on that first set and we were going to be set up in a really good spot, I think.”
What Berry Actually Did Wrong
Nothing, by his own account or his team’s. Berry admitted the failure caught him off guard, given how strong his car had felt in the laps leading up to it. “I was fully convinced it was going to be hammer down,” he said, describing how he noticed rivals closing in on his pace only in the final laps before the fire took hold. “You could see some people start coming back to us, and you can tell, right? The pace yesterday in practice was 15.70s, 15.80s, hammer down the whole time. And when we’re in the 16s that quick, I was like, you can tell that’s going on.”
Team co-owner Len Wood, watching a third consecutive disastrous finish unfold, told Berry before the race that he could not recall the team ever enduring back-to-back last-place results, let alone three in a row. Berry found dark humor in the streak once it was final. “Better than three last-place finishes,” he said, managing a smile. “Len was saying before the race he never thought they had two in a row and now we’ve got three in a row.”
Berry’s path to NASCAR’s biggest stage wasn’t a fast one. He spent the better part of a decade grinding through Late Model and regional short-track competition in Tennessee before JR Motorsports gave him a full-time Xfinity Series opportunity, and it took until his mid-thirties for a Cup Series ride to materialize with Stewart-Haas Racing before he moved to Wood Brothers Racing this season. A driver who waited that long for a shot rarely gets the luxury of writing off a set of circumstances as bad luck and moving on without a second thought, and Berry’s measured tone in describing three different failures said as much about his patience as it did about the mechanical problems themselves.
The Company He’s Keeping
Berry wasn’t alone at the bottom of the standings when the checkered flag fell. Alex Bowman, who entered the night 35 points below the cutline and briefly looked like he might survive on points as other contenders faltered, was eliminated alongside him. Austin Dillon and Shane van Gisbergen rounded out the four drivers cut from championship contention, a group that, by the account of NASCAR analysts who broke down the round afterward, had collectively endured close to the worst run of playoff racing seen from a bottom four in the Chase era.
For Berry, a sophomore Cup Series driver still building his postseason resume, the manner of this elimination carries a different weight than a simple on-track mistake would have. Each of his three Round of 16 finishes traced back to circumstances outside the car’s control at the moment of impact: a bottoming chassis at Darlington, contact from another driver at Gateway, and a mechanical fire at Bristol brought on by a tire compound NASCAR introduced for the entire field. There is little a driver can do differently against any of those outcomes, which is part of what made Stanley’s calm read on the season ahead stand out given the circumstances.
“We just keep building fast cars and bring fast cars to the race track, and that’s all we can do,” Stanley said. “We’ll try and win some races here coming up in this stretch.”
What Comes Next
Berry and the No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing team now turn to the final seven races of the season with nothing left to defend and nothing left to lose, a stretch that includes a return to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where the pairing won in March. A win in a non-playoff race won’t rewrite the story of this postseason, but for a team that spent three consecutive weekends explaining what went wrong rather than what went right, simply finishing a race under power would qualify as its own kind of relief.
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