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HAMPTON, Ga. — NASCAR officials announced Saturday that the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 Toyota team in the XFINITY Series had been penalized for an infraction found in Friday night’s pre-qualifying inspection at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Competition officials said the car, driven this weekend in the Rinnai 250 by Denny Hamlin, was found with an incorrectly mounted splitter structure.

Under NASCAR’s new deterrence system, which went into effect ahead of the 2017 season, the team will forfeit its pit stall selection for next weekend’s event at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. New for this year for the XFINITY Series, teams make their pit-stall selections one week in advance based on the current weekend’s qualifying results.

In previous years, it would have taken four warnings before this particular penalty was levied.

The JGR No. 20 Toyota is scheduled to be driven next weekend by Daniel Suarez, the 2016 series champion, in the Boyd Gaming 300 (March 11, 4 p.m. ET, FS1, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

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RELATED: Full race results | Standings | Detailed breakdown | Shop: Busch gear


HAMPTON, Ga. – It took Kyle Busch 13 years to get his first NASCAR XFINITY Series victory at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

It took him one more year to get the second.

The pole winner at Atlanta for the sixth time, Busch pulled away after a restart on Lap 148 of 163 and beat Brad Keselowski to the finish line by .605 seconds to score his second straight victory at the 1.54-mile track in Saturday’s Rinnai 250.

"It took so long to get here to begin with," Busch said in Victory Lane. "Now we’ve won two in a row. We weren’t great to begin with, and we weren’t great in the middle, but (crew chief) Scott Graves and the guys keep working on the car throughout the race and brought the No. 18 (Toyota) to life there at the end."

Busch was first off pit road under the fifth caution of the afternoon after Kyle Larson, the leader entering pit road, nearly collided with Kevin Harvick, the dominant driver for most of the race with 64 laps led. The near-miss cost both drivers a fraction of a second — enough for Busch to exit with the lead.

"I can’t say enough about my pit crew," Busch said. "They did an awesome job getting me off pit road first for that final run."

Later, Busch’s race-winning entry failed post-race inspection for a height violation, according to NASCAR officials. Busch’s car measured too low on both the right and left front. The car will be taken back to the NASCAR Research & Development Center in Concord, North Carolina for final inspection and any penalties will be announced next week.


RELATED: Busch’s No. 18 fails post-race inspection

The victory was Busch’s 87th in 329 XFINITY starts, extending his own series record.

Both Larson and Harvick fell back on the Lap 148 restart and finished third and fourth, respectively. Elliott Sadler, who ran fifth in the No. 1 JR Motorsports Chevrolet, had the best result among series regulars and leads the XFINITY standings by three points over Sunoco rookie William Byron.

Darrell Wallace Jr., Byron, Austin Dillon, Daniel Hemric and Cole Custer completed the top 10. Drawing a penalty for too many men over the wall on pit road, Custer restarted from the rear after a Lap 118 caution for Denny Hamlin’s spin in Turn 1, but recovered to earn his top-10 finish in the No. 00 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford.

The race was contested in three stages, the first two of 40 laps each before an 83-lap final stage. Keselowski, a Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series regular, won the first stage, earning a playoff point for the No. 22 Team Penske Ford.

Harvick won Stage 2 convincingly, but his car tightened up in the final third of the race, as shadows covered Turns 1 and 2.

As a full-time monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series driver, Busch is ineligible to earn points in the XFINITY Series, but his victory was worth five playoff points on the owner’s side to the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing team.



Contributing: NASCAR.com staff


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HAMPTON, Ga. — Elliott Sadler bounced back from a setback in qualifying while Darrell Wallace Jr. battled back from his own demons.


Both NASCAR XFINITY Series drivers scored top-10 finishes in Saturday’s Rinnai 250 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, rebounding solidly following disappointing results a week earlier in the season-opening race at Daytona.



Sadler, who started 22nd after a tire problem during qualifying Saturday morning, scored a fifth-place finish at AMS. The qualifying issue turned out to not be an issue after all for the JR Motorsports driver.



He was fifth on a restart with 16 laps remaining, and quickly moved up to third, but couldn’t hold off the charges of Kevin Harvick and Kyle Larson during the closing laps.



"I wanted to tighten it up some so I could drive it hard there at the end, those last 15 laps, and I got them to go too far," Sadler said of his radio conversation with crew chief Kevin Meendering. "But we got beat by some of the best at this race track; I think the car was better than I was today."



Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series regulars dominated the race, with Kyle Busch earning the win while Brad Keselowski, Larson and Harvick placed second, third and fourth, respectively.



Sadler said he knew his car was a contender as early as Friday in practice. If there was any blame, he said, it was on his shoulders.



"This is a very line-sensitive track and those guys are so good at going around the bottom, they really are," he said. "And I didn’t do a good job all day of staying on the bottom to run with those guys. But I’m very proud of my team. A fifth-place finish for us here at Atlanta we’re ecstatic with that."



The finish vaulted Sadler to the top of the point standings a week after a crash at Daytona soured an otherwise solid opening weekend.



"We’ve been fast both races so that’s all we can ask for and we’ll move on from there," he said. "We had the winning car at Daytona, we had a top-five car here today. That’s very impressive coming out of the chute with all these new rules and new stuff going on for my guys to prepare my cars this way."



For Wallace, the trip might not have been as far numerically — he finished sixth after qualifying 13th – but it was no less difficult. It was a top 10 he talked himself into, he said.



"It all starts with me not getting frustrated," said Wallace, driver of the No. 6 Ford for Roush Fenway Racing. "Not replaying things from last year. I was doing that. I was doing that that whole first segment. I’m like ‘Stop! Stop!’ I was talking to myself."



Surprisingly, it took golf lessons to put the 23-year-old in the proper frame of mind.



"I went and took lessons and the four things he told me to be better, I used those to kind of help me relax, although they had nothing to do with racing," Wallace said.



"Really keeping a cool head, no mistakes on pit road — I thought I was flirting with speed lines all day and didn’t get busted there — and we were able to capitalize on those last restarts. We needed it."



Wallace had come away from Daytona with a 33rd-place finish. Saturday’s result propelled him to 14th in points.



"That’s just the never-give-up attitude we’ve got going this year," he said of his RFR group. "Look at Ryan (Reed) last week at Daytona, spun out twice, mangled car comes back and wins it. Now we’re here.



"We know we need to unload a little bit better to have a better shot at winning one of these things. Just a great day for us, to keep our heads calm, to run good for Leidos.


"I was fighting hard for that top five and then I burned my stuff up. Then the veteran Harvick got by me. Good day here in Atlanta; we needed it, especially to rebound after Daytona."


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HAMPTON, Ga. – Christopher Bell unquestionably had the dominant truck in Saturday’s Active Pest Control 200, but, in the end, the driver of the No. 4 Kyle Busch Motorsports Toyota Tundra had to work hard for the third NASCAR Camping World Truck Series victory of his career.

 

In the nightcap of a NASCAR doubleheader at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Bell held off fellow Tundra driver Matt Crafton in a two-lap shootout to the finish for his first win of the 2017 season.

 

Austin Cindric’s spin on Lap 124 of 130 brought out the eighth and final caution of the race and set up the final two-lap dash. Bell restarted on the inside on Lap 129, with Crafton in the outside lane. Crafton held his own through the first two corners, but Bell pulled ahead on the backstretch and finally cleared Crafton’s No. 88 Toyota off Turn 4.

 

One lap later, Bell crossed the finish line .447 seconds ahead of Crafton, with defending series champion Johnny Sauter trailing the lead pair in third place. Ben Rhodes ran fourth, followed by Chase Elliott.

 

“I was just trying to do everything I could to get the best restart I could,” Bell said. “I didn’t want to get my momentum broken. These Truck races are really tough to get restarts going, because it’s so aero-dependent.

 

“You can get all sorts of momentum or you can get all sorts of momentum taken away from you. That happened to me there in the middle section of the race.”

 

But the truck was there when it counted.

 

“It was just a dream machine. It was really, really good.”

 

Clearly, that was an understatement. Bell edged his team owner for the pole position in Saturday morning’s qualifying session and proceeded to lead the first 83 laps, claiming both the first and second 40-lap stage wins in the process.

 

In fact, Bell was so dominant in the second stage that crossed the stripe 8.030 seconds ahead of Busch, who nevertheless took the lead with an excellent pit stop, putting Bell in the outside lane for the start of Stage 3 on Lap 88.

 

Bell subsequently fell back to fifth in the running order, but after two cautions, he restarted from the inside lane on the third row on Lap 113 and one lap later passed Crafton for the lead.

 

Busch, who won the NASCAR XFINITY Series race earlier in the day, fell back with a cut tire on the Lap 113 restart and finished 26th, but he could take solace from the quality of Bell’s effort – not to mention the progress the 22-year-old has made since Busch signed the open-wheel star to a full-time ride last year.

 

“We’re still trying to get the Sprint Car out of him,” Busch quipped after the race. “This kid grows up running 30-lap features, and after 30 laps his tires are worn out.”

 

On Saturday, however, Bell decisively overcame the “Days of Thunder” mentality Busch described, and with the race win and two stage victories, came away with all seven available playoff points in the process.

 

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HAMPTON, Ga. — Kyle Busch’s race-winning entry in Saturday’s Rinnai 250 NASCAR XFINITY Series race failed post-race inspection for a height violation, according to NASCAR officials.

 

Busch’s car measured too low on both the right and left front.

 

The winning car, as well as the No. 1 JR Motorsports Chevrolet of fifth-place Elliott Sadler, which was the random car, will be taken back to the NASCAR Research & Development Center in Concord, North Carolina, for final inspection.

 

"I don’t know. I didn’t feel anything happen … over the course of the day," Busch said after joining Camping World Truck Series race winner Christopher Bell in the media center afterward. Bell competes for Busch’s Kyle Busch Motorsports organization.


RELATED: Bell wins Truck Series race at Atlanta

"I don’t remember what kind of adjustments we were making; I know we were going track bar down and wedge out so that should actually kind of lifted the front a little bit maybe, but I don’t know how low it was or anything like that," Busch said. "I haven’t heard anything. I don’t even know what the penalty is now."

 

Busch said the No. 18 entry is scheduled to run the entire XFINITY schedule with a variety of drivers, "so I guess I’ll have to figure out who I’m working with next week."

 

He is scheduled to compete in 10 of this year’s XFINITY races, including next week when the series travels to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the Boyd Gaming 300 on March 11.

 

Busch led twice for 26 laps in the 163-lap event, the second stop for XFINITY Series teams this season, but beat the field off pit road late for the final lead change of the race. He led the final 19 laps.

 

The win was his 87th in the XFINITY Series and the 171st overall among NASCAR’s three national series (Monster Energy NASCAR Cup, XFINITY and Camping World Truck).

 

Any penalty or penalties as a result of the infraction are expected to be announced mid-week.

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HAMPTON, Ga. — The fire that forced a midseason rebuilding effort at ThorSport Racing last year impacted all of its four teams in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. From a results standpoint, ThorSport driver Ben Rhodes was not immune.
That’s why Saturday’s showing at Atlanta Motor Speedway gave Rhodes reason for optimism as he dives into his second full season in the series. Rhodes finished fourth in the Active Pest Control 200, finishing just behind race winner Christopher Bell of Kyle Busch Motorsports, Rhodes’ ThorSport teammate, runner-up Matt Crafton and Johnny Sauter.

RELATED: Bell takes Atlanta Truck Series race

The top-five effort helped soothe some of the hardships Rhodes & Co. endured over the latter part of 2016. The strength he showed in the opening nine races of the year gave way to four DNFs and just one top-10 over the final 14 events.

Saturday, things started looking up.

“I had a really tough year, so it’s really encouraging that we can come out here and get a good finish like this and see that we can run strong,” Rhodes said after emerging from his No. 27 Toyota. “And now that the truck’s all in one piece, that’s an added bonus because all last year, it seemed like no matter what we did, something would happen and we would get caught up in somebody’s mess. Tire would blow, engine would blow … something would happen. So it’s really, really nice to put a good finish together.”

After a rookie season that held so much promise, Rhodes and his crew have made the earliest steps toward a rebirth. The 20-year-old driver has a new crew chief in Eddie Troconis, a new car number based on sponsor Safelite’s preference, and a new, reconstructed shop in their Sandusky, Ohio, home.

RELATED: ThorSport rebuilds after devastating fire

 

“Ever since the shop’s been rebuilt, these guys have worked their tails off over the wintertime, working 80 hours a week to get these trucks built and build some fast Tundras at that,” Rhodes said. “I really think that we’re going to be a contender for many, many, many wins throughout the season.”

Said Troconis: “We came here and we showed that ThorSport regrouped over the offseason and worked really hard all December and January, and now we’re trying to beat the KBM (Kyle Busch Motorsports) trucks. They were the dominant team last year, and we’re right there with them. We showed that it’s not just one truck with Crafton that has a lot of experience, but also the young rookie guns.

“So Ben’s second year, we have a lot of work to do still, but I feel like definitely we’re going to have a lot of potential. We’re going to give a run at KBM.”

Rhodes battled back from a pair of hurdles during Saturday’s 200-miler. He first made progress from a 15th-place qualifying effort that left him with a midpack start. And he also found himself at a disadvantage in a series of late-race restarts, mired in the treacherous outside lane and at a higher risk of wheel spin.

The lineup shuffle for the final two restarts gave him the preferred inside lane and kept him in victory contention. Though he settled for fourth, he still managed a grin when asked about the race’s possibilities.

“If a couple things play out a little bit differently, I think we could be on the frontstretch doing donuts right now,” Rhodes said.

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Editor’s note: Every Friday during the season, "Tweets You Might Have Missed" presents eight of the best NASCAR-related tweets from the week. 

 

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HAMPTON, Ga. — NASCAR’s 2017 rules package will be put to the test for the first time in race conditions when Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series teams hit the track for this weekend’s Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.



Practice and qualifying for the series’ second stop of the season gets underway today at the 1.54-mile track, with Sunday’s race scheduled for a 2:46 p.m. ET green flag (FOX, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

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2018 DAYTONA 500 VIP Ticket Packages are now available from PrimeSport! As the Official Ticket Exchange of Daytona International Speedway, PrimeSport has your access to all the action at the World Center of Racing! Receive $50 off per reservation when you book your 2018 DAYTONA package by Saturday March 4th. Use code DAYTONA18 at checkout. Coupon code DAYTONA18 is active now through Saturday March, 4th. | GO HERE