|
 With Keselowski and teammate Joey Logano trying to coordinate a
restart--Logano choosing the outside lane and dropping down in front
of Keselowski's No. 2 Team Penske Ford--the field stacked up behind
them.
Kurt Busch's Chevrolet rammed the back of Keselowski's car, knocking
it out of shape. Unable to control his Ford, Keselowski tangled with
Matt Kenseth, and both cars sustained severe damage in the wreck, So
did Busch, who slammed into the inside wall on the backstretch.
"I got hit from behind and (that) pushed me into the 20 (Kenseth),
and my right front wheel hit Kenseth's left-rear, and it just broke
the right-front suspension off the car," said Keselowski, who led
143 of the 500 laps and at one point held an 8.9-second advantage on
Logano in second place.
"The car wouldn't turn and just kept going straight until I couldn't
do anything, and I started wrecking everybody. I just didn't have
any steering wheel left."
Nineteen laps later, Kenseth drove Logano into the Turn 1 wall,
retribution for an incident at Kansas two weeks earlier, when Logano
spun Kenseth, who was leading the race with five laps left.
Kyle Busch perseveres to top-five finish
Before the halfway point of Sunday's Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup
race at Martinsville, Kyle Busch was in jeopardy of joining
teammates Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth, eliminated last Sunday at
Talladega, on the Chase sidelines.
Busch hit a patch of moisture on the track, spun on Lap 171 and
damaged the front suspension of his No. 18 Joe Gibbs racing Toyota.
He dropped to 28th in the running order for a restart on Lap 180.
But Busch worked his way through the field, ultimately finishing
fifth and leaving Martinsville tied with Martin Truex Jr. for second
in the Chase standings behind race winner Jeff Gordon.
"I screwed us up early in the race and touched that water down there
in Turn 1 and spun out with the 3 car (Austin Dillon), so that was
my bad," Busch said. "I bent up the front end of the car and it was
just never right from there on out, but we persevered and we just
made the changes that we needed to make for this car for our
conditions that we had.
"The car there at the end was good enough for a top five, so I'm
glad we finished there. Everybody is so equal here and when it's
those last sort of restarts like that you are just going for
everything you've got -- whoever's in front of you, get them out of
the way. All in all, good day for us. Real proud of this team and
everything that we've been doing this year. Hopefully we keep it
going."
[to top of second column] |
Safety play pays off for Harvick
Jockeying for position at the exit from pit road could have been
costly for Kevin Harvick, but an opportune caution helped the
defending NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion salvage an eighth-place
finish and kept his hopes for a second straight title very much
alive.
Under caution on Lap 420, Harvick slowed at the exit from pit road
to try to gerrymander himself into an odd-numbered position in the
running order--which would have put him on the inside row for the
subsequent restart on lap 426.
Instead, he and Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Kurt Busch collided,
damaging the sheet metal surrounding the left front tire of
Harvick's No. 4 Chevrolet. But the caution flag flew again on Lap
430, enabling Harvick to bring his car to pit road for repairs.
"We got run into there, coming out of the pits and I couldn't really
tell how bad it was," Harvick said. "But (crew chief) Rodney
(Childers), I could tell the panic in his voice. And luckily, the
caution came out, because I saw the smoke coming out of the left
front tire. But, it was a good call to come back in.
"We were able to get a couple of good restarts there; and then with
the front smashed-in, and everything happening, it was just way too
tight back there in traffic. But all in all, it was a good day with
a lot of chaotic things going on, on the race track. So we just
needed to finish that one where we were running; not having a chance
to win, we just needed to capitalize on some other peoples' bad
day."
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