Kasey Kahne set to move on from Hendrick, looking for new team

Although Kasey Kahne knows he won’t be part of Hendrick Motorsports in 2018, team owner Rick Hendrick is committed to helping him find a job – particularly with a team that already has deep ties to the Hendrick organization.

While that may have boosted Kahne’s hopes, it created one big question: Where?

Several of the bigger teams have affiliated teams – Roush Racing has Wood Brothers Racing; Joe Gibbs Racing has Furniture Row Racing; and, Richard Childress Racing has JTG Daugherty and Germain Racing – but Hendrick only as a deal with Chip Ganassi Racing in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series.

It’s clear Ganassi will do everything to keep Kyle Larson on board for the future, so that only leaves Jamie McMurray as a possible target.

No matter what, Kahne knows there aren’t a lot of good rides remaining.

“Yeah, I mean I think we all know that there are not a ton of opportunities,” he said. “There are some really good drivers that don’t have a deal done at this time that will probably end up in cars I would think. I just feel like the opportunities are pretty slim, but I’ve always tried to be really respectful and when I’ve had the opportunity to go fast and win we have been able to win some races.”

Kahne won the Brickyard 400 last month for his first victory since 2014.

Hendrick is a co-owner of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s JR Motorsports team in the Xfinity Series, but Kahne said he only wants to drive a Cup car.

“I really think that I can come up with something good and come up with something that will be fun to be a part of and also try to work hard to make that team better than it’s ever been and myself better than I’ve been,” Kahne said. “I think I’ve lived a great part of the sport, been part of all that and I don’t want to be done yet.”

Toyota playing games

to hide its power

Brad Keselowski spent as much time talking about Toyota slowing down in pole qualifying to avoid NASCAR’s watchful eye last Friday as he did talking about winning the pole in a Ford in his home state.

As the Chase for the Championship approaches, some teams think NASCAR may confiscate several cars to make sure everyone’s on the same level for the playoffs.

Although Matt Kenseth, Kyle Busch, Erik Jones and Denny Hamlin all started from the top 10, Keselowski still believes the car company was holding back.

“About this time every year NASCAR takes all the cars to kind of check to make sure that the competitive balance is where they want it to be, and I think we’ve seen the last two or three weeks that the Toyota cars are pretty dominant,” Keselowski said. “We had a strong suspicion that those guys would kind of tune it down this weekend, so not to post a pretty big number in inspection that maybe balanced back out the competition, and potentially that’s right because our team hasn’t done much differently and those guys are just not as fast as they’ve been the last few weeks.”

Toyota, which angrily denied the claim, had won the pole in the five previous races before Michigan.

“This is kind of the last opportunity for NASCAR to do that, so we came into the weekend thinking that some of those really strong cars would tune it down and knowing that we probably were pretty close to what we had the last few weeks,” Keselowski said.

Lost in the dustup was the fact Kyle Larson won the race in a Chevrolet.