Wet. Wet again. I can’t stand rain. If it rains at one more race this year, I am going to lose my mind. I have attended races for years, and all it ever does is rain. Ever heard of the 2012 Daytona 500? The first 500 to be rain delayed to the next day. After 55 years! And yes, I was there.

So whenever a race is delayed to another day, I get rather angry. And that’s exactly what happened in the first race of this year’s contender round. The race was delayed from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon. Matt Kenseth was the pole sitter, and he led the first seventy-five laps.

As the lap count reached 70, the first title contender found trouble. And he wasn’t the last. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Carl Edwards, both Chase drivers, tapped, and Jr. flew up the track and hit the wall. He managed to keep going, but about five laps later hit the wall again. For the rest of the day he struggled, hitting the wall multiple times, and finishing outside the top-25.

The next title contender to find trouble was Kyle Busch. Busch and Kyle Larson, who were both running near the front of the field, collided while entering pit road. Busch was pretending to go on pit road, to try to trick other drivers into pitting. Larson was doing the same thing, but a different way. Larson turned down the track and Busch turned up the track. The two hit, spun, and neither managed to get back to the front of the field.

One other Chaser found trouble. Matt Kenseth. Kenseth was caught off sequence in pit strategy, falling behind in the running order. As he attempted to battle back, him and fellow Chaser Ryan Newman bumped. Ryan accidentally turned Matt up the track and hard into the wall. Kenseth made seven pit stops trying to fix the damage, but finally wrecked out of the race, finishing 41st. As of now, Kenseth, Newman, Ky. Busch, and Earnhardt are the four lowest ranking driver in the Chase. And two races from now, the lowest four are eliminated from championship contention. Busch and Newman are within striking distance as far as points go, but Kenseth and Dale need a miracle. Or in this case, a win.

Now, back to the race. When Kenseth lost the lead, Joey Logano took it. And held it for 223 laps, a career high. Now, it would be just plain mean to lead that many laps and not win. Well, Kevin Harvick planned for just that to happen. Joey was very fast, but Kevin was at least his equal.

A restart with about 90 laps to go turned out to be the last restart of the day, and Joey and Kevin were the top-two. for ninety laps the two of them raced each other, some times closer together, sometimes farther. As the final laps approached, Logano was 1.5 seconds ahead of Harvick. But for once, it appeared that Harvick was not a match for Logano.

Joey won the race. It was his fourth this year, his first in the Chase, and he now has a win this year at every variety of track the Cup series races at. Also, this is the second year in a row that Logano has opened the contender round with a win. This puts him in good shape for the next two weeks, especially with the dreaded Talladega looming.