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Austin Cindric edges Chase Elliott in photo finish to take Stage 1 at Talladega

FaceProfileby:Thomas Goldkamp•04/21/24
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Credit: NASCAR on Fox

A fun first stage at Talladega on Sunday afternoon resulted in a photo finish for the Stage 1 win, with Austin Cindric edging out Chase Elliott by a hair.

The win was Cindric’s second stage win in the NASCAR Cup Series this season, while Elliott had also won one going into the day. Elliott narrowly missed out on a second by the slimmest of margins.

Check out how tight the finish was below.

Cindric came into the day at No. 21 in the NASCAR Cup Series standings, sitting on 159 total points, with 28 of them stage points. In nine starts, Cindric had one top 5, one top 10 and one DNF. He had led 51 laps this season going into Saturday’s GEICO 500 at Talladega.

Denny Hamlin spins coming into pit road

Though there were no cautions in the first stage at the GEICO 500 at Talladega, the race wasn’t completely without incident.

Denny Hamlin‘s No. 11 Toyota went for a spin during green flag pit stops.

Hamlin was part of a seven-car pack that came into pit road at the same time. His car got a little squirrely on him toward the back of the pack, and Hamlin careened to his right to side tap John Hunter Nemechek.

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The No. 11 driver told his team that he hit a puddle coming into pit road, which caused his spin.

Radio communications acting up at Talladega

In addition to Hamlin’s spin, radio issues plagued a few drivers during the opening stage of the race. Both Bubba Wallace and Martin Truex Jr. reported having radio communications issues.

Not being able to speak to your spotter can be absolutely detrimental at Talladega Superspeedway, so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly they get cleaned up.

But the drivers were clearly frustrated by it.

The team of Truex said simply: “All four radios are f***ed up right now.”

Wallace and Truex seemed to be dealing with it fine, for the most part. But Joey Logano served a pass-through penalty for speeding on pit road that was in part caused by the poor communication.

On3’s Jonathan Howard also contributed to this report.