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We apologize. We are having technical issues with our comment sections and fan community and it is temporarily unavailable. We are actively working on these issues and hope to have it up and running soon. We are also working on enhancements to provide a better forum for our fans. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience.
We apologize. We are having technical issues with our comment sections and fan community and it is temporarily unavailable. We are actively working on these issues and hope to have it up and running soon. We are also working on enhancements to provide a better forum for our fans. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience.
No. 54 makes it to Victory Lane after leading majority at Bristol
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Kyle Busch caught a glimpse of the future, and it was in his rearview mirror coming to the final turn of Saturday’s Jeff Foxworthy’s Grit Chips 300 at Bristol Motor Speedway.
(See full results from the race)
“I’m 27 and I’m getting old,” said Busch, after holding off 20-year-old Nationwide Series rookie Kyle Larson in a finish that no doubt aged him slightly.
Larson, making his fourth Nationwide start, trailed Busch by five car lengths with 10 laps to go but went high around lap traffic and traded paint with Busch as the two crossed the finish line .023 seconds apart, making it the second-closest finish ever at Bristol.
“I did everything I could to try to protect the momentum,” Busch said. “A young kid like that, he’s got a lot of talent. He’s obviously made a name for himself. He was running hard, that’s for sure. He brought a lot to the table today and brought his show to the fans. ”
Coming to the finish line, Busch had a decision to make: Maintain the high line or go low around the lap car of Brad Teague.
“There were two thoughts,” Busch said. “You don’t ever want to give anyone the bottom for a cheap shot. Two, I ran the top in (Turns) 1 and 2 and gained so much ground on (Teague), I was afraid I was going to run into the back of him coming off Turn 4 — or I slow down any little bit and it hurts my run. Then Larson might have enough speed on the bottom to beat me back to the line. Knowing that the start-finish line is only halfway down the straightaway, I just needed to lunge off the corner to make it.”
Larson, from Elk Grove, Calif., was happy to see Busch go low.
“I tried a couple of moves on Kyle around the bottle and (my car) was just a little too tight off (the corner) to get back to the throttle," he said. "The last lap, I was pretty happy he went to the bottom to block a slide-job or whatever. It gave me one more shot to try to get around him and he left me just enough room to squeeze the outside. I just missed it by a couple of feet, but it was a lot of fun.”
Driving the Cottonelle Chevrolet for Turner Scott Motorsports, Larson entered the race simply seeking a solid result after finishing no better than 13th in any of his first three starts.
“We’d kind of been digging ourselves a hole,” he said.
Busch, who started 13th, noted that although Larson didn’t win the race, he won a measure of respect.
“You certainly want to win races the right way,” he said. “Coming up, running races in the Nationwide Series, Cup Series, I didn’t win a lot, but the ones that I did — there’s a way of going about things. There’s the way I did it and the way (Brad) Keselowski did it — ruffling a lot of feathers.
“(Larson) played it smart today. That was good on his end. I think a lot of people have been looking at him to try to see whether he was going to be a wrecker or a checker. Today he didn’t get the checker. That will come. If you’re driving into the corner and driving into the back of me — I’m going to be here for a while. … He’s not going to have fun dealing with me every week. Right now, I’m going to race him as hard as he raced me but just as clean as he raced me."
Busch, who made NASCAR history at Bristol in 2010 when he became the first driver to win all three national touring events in the same weekend, appears to be in the midst of another potentially dominant weekend. He will sit on the pole for Sunday’s Food City 500 and also turned the fastest laps in both Sprint Cup practice sessions on Saturday.
But Larson turned what looked like a battle between Busch and veteran Kevin Harvick into a three-dog fight.
“I was catching them. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got to them,” said Larson, who stayed on the gas as the two leaders battled their way through lap traffic.
Busch led 92 of the first 225 laps, however the run for the money began about Lap 230 when Busch and Harvick approached a five-car group of slower cars. It took nearly 10 laps for the lead duo to clear the pack and, by the time they did, Larson was applying pressure.
Harvick, who led 43 laps, elected to pit under caution with 32 laps remaining. Unable to match Busch’s speed while running low on the track and slated to restart on the inside lane, Harvick elected to take four fresh tires. He restarted eighth and finished fifth.
Brian Vickers and Sam Hornish Jr. finished third and fourth. Hornish extended his series lead to 22 points over Justin Allgaier, the pole-sitter who led the first 62 laps but settled for eighth.
Fellow NASCAR Nationwide Series title contender Dillon qualifies second
VIEW: STARTING LINEUP/PRACTICE RESULTS
Justin Allgaier earned his first Coors Light Pole Award of the season at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday for the NASCAR Nationwide Series Jeff Foxworthy’s Grit Chips 300.
The top starting position marks Allgaier’s first pole with Turner Scott Motorsports and fourth of his career. The previous three at Memphis, Nashville and Gateway all came when he was driving for Roger Penske.
Starting next to him on the outside will be Austin Dillon, followed by last week’s winner Sam Hornish Jr., Regan Smith and Elliott Sadler. The first Sprint Cup driver in the field is Brad Keselowski, starting sixth.
Morgan Shepherd, Danny Efland and Joey Gase did not qualify. Gase was involved in a wreck in practice and did not have a backup car, so he did not make an attempt.
Allgaier earned his first NASCAR Nationwide Series win at Bristol in 2010.
The race is set for 2 p.m. and will be broadcast on ESPN2.
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Johnson, Biffle make adjustments between sessions
Coors Light Pole Award winner Kyle Busch led teammates Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin in the first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series practice session on Saturday morning for the Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. The Joe Gibbs Racing trio was followed by Jeff Burton and Kasey Kahne.
The rest of the top 10 was rounded out by a fleet of Chevrolets, the last being the No. 48 of Jimmie Johnson, who ran 48 laps but was not happy with his Chevrolet SS. Johnson described it as “bouncy” and crew chief Chad Knaus said they were going to start over, changing the drive shaft, axles and anything they could before the next practice.
VIEW: ALL PRACTICE RESULTS
Joey Logano was the first Ford in 11th, followed by teammate Brad Keselowski and rookie Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
Busch dominated the day by going to the to of the speed charts for the final practice, with Kenseth and Hamlin in fourth and fifth, respectively.
The Cinderella story of the day was David Gilliland, who shot into the top five of the speed charts and stayed in third all session, running 64 laps. Kahne rounds out the top five, filling the second place spot.
After having issues in the first practice, but still finishing in the top 10, Johnson was ninth in the final practice.
The Food City 500 is Sunday at 1 p.m. ET on FOX.
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After two wrecks in three races, Larson battles Busch for first
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Kyle Larson didn’t start Saturday’s NASCAR Nationwide Series race by setting the bar sky-high, not after enduring heavy crashes in two of the first three events to start the season. For the 20-year-old rookie, a solid finish within the top 10 would have sufficed.
After scoring a dramatic runner-up finish at Bristol Motor Speedway in a side-by-side duel with Kyle Busch, the leader atop the series’ all-time wins list, Larson realized those modest goals and then some. He also earned a significant amount of respect for not just where he finished, but how he raced the winner in the closing laps.
Larson erased the sour taste of severe wrecks in the season opener at Daytona and in last week’s event at Las Vegas by posting a career-best second-place finish in the Jeff Foxworthy’s Grit Chips 300. The performance helped him move from 14th up to ninth in the Nationwide Series standings, but also helped Larson breathe a sigh of relief at day’s end.
"It’s been a rough three weeks so far," Larson said. "I think I was running 10th early in the race and I was thinking, ‘I’m happy here and I’d just like to finish.’ Missed a couple of wrecks, and just really, really wanted to finish. But then, once I got to the front, I wanted to win. It was a lot of fun. I just needed to finish because we were kind of digging ourselves a hole here, especially after Vegas. I just need to be consistent from here on out and try and inch back up the points standings.”
Larson started 12th and was contently running ninth at the halfway point, but he methodically gained spots as Sprint Cup Series regulars Busch, Kevin Harvick and, for a while, Brad Keselowski battled in front of him. By Lap 255 of the 300-lapper, he had closed up to the lead pair of Busch and Harvick and slightly damaged the right-front corner of his car in a three-way logjam in lap traffic.
When Harvick pitted during the race’s eighth and final caution period, Larson inherited second place and closed up on Busch’s back bumper. The rookie looked high and low for a path to pass in the final 10 laps, ultimately driving it in deep around the high line to pull alongside on the white-flag lap. The two knocked fenders as they whisked under the checkered flag with Larson winding up just .023 seconds shy of a breakthrough victory.
Perhaps cognizant of the boo-birds he heard after banging C.E. Falk III aside to win the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series portion of the UNOH Battle at the Beach at Daytona last month, Larson made a point to keep it clean engaging Busch over the final stages.
"I didn’t want to have anything like that happen again and have more people having a bad look at me, because I don’t race that way," Larson said. "I didn’t want to move him or anything like that; I wanted to try to outrace him. I think I’d get a little more respect that way and it definitely made for a better finish, I think."
Busch appreciated the show of sportsmanship, especially as his young rival makes initial impressions in NASCAR’s national series.
"He played it smart today. That was good on his end," Busch said. "You know, a lot of people have been looking at him to see if he’s going to be a wrecker or a checker, and today, even though he didn’t get the checkers, that’s how you get ’em.
"That’ll come back. I mean, (if) you drive in the corner and drive in the back of me or something like that, I’m going to be here for a while, and if he keeps coming up the ranks, he’s not going to have fun dealing with me every week. But right now, I’m going to race him as hard as he raced me but just as clean as he raced me because he didn’t put a fender on me all day."
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Kyle Busch leads nine drivers to break 15-second barrier in Thunder Valley
VIEW: STARTING LINEUP/PRACTICE RESULTS
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Kyle Busch‘s blazing-fast qualifying lap Friday afternoon provided an answer to who would start from the Coors Light Pole in Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. But it also begged the question: Just how fast can they go?
Busch looped the .533-mile track at a track-record speed of 129.535 mph, besting Ryan Newman‘s 128.709-mph mark which had stood since 2003. The 14.813-second lap was the best of nine qualifying efforts that eclipsed the 15-second mark; only three drivers in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series history before Friday had dipped into the 14-second ether.
"It just shows how good these cars are. To come out with a new car and have them drive this nice off the bat is a pretty nice deal."
— Tony Stewart
The five-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race winner at Bristol continued his fast weekend Saturday, sweeping both practice sessions and leading the Joe Gibbs Racing trio for a 1-2-3 finish atop the scoring pylon after the morning practice.
The combination of the new Gen-6 car, Bristol’s recent resurfacing or the Goodyear tire compound produced record speed ahead of the first short-track race of the year. As on the edge as Busch was, he said the likelihood of going faster in qualifying trim was a possibility.
"You could certainly put a softer tire on here and go lights out, but you’d have trouble making it very much longer after," Busch said, noting that the pace will certainly be more conservative in race trim Sunday. "You get a little bit better tire on it and start pushing lower lap times and then you start getting higher loads and then you’ll probably start seeing some fatigue in parts and stuff like that.
"If it was like the old days where guys would go places and try to do speed runs — you would take the lead out, and you would build a car as light as you could for here just to go make a lap. I bet you could run somewhere in the low 14s probably — some teens or 20s."
Those sentiments were echoed by Kasey Kahne, who qualified second — missing the pole position by .062 seconds — and was second-fastest in Saturday’s final practice.
"I think those speeds today were pretty good, especially what Kyle did," Kahne said Friday. "That’s fast. You put softer tires on it and you might be able to go faster; I don’t know."
As Newman watched his 10-year-old record fade away, he was conscious of the fact that his enduring lap came during the Gen-4 era of NASCAR racers. "A lot of things have changed — the track has changed and everything else," said Newman, who managed just the 31st-fastest qualifying time for Sunday’s race.
For his boss, Tony Stewart, who qualified eighth among the 14-second club, the torrid pace in a confined space was nothing new. As the owner of high-banked Eldora Speedway, a half-mile dirt track in Ohio which will host the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series for the first time in July, Stewart could only shrug.
"You’ve never watched winged sprint cars run around Eldora, have you?" Stewart said after his qualifying lap. "I can promise you the track record at Eldora is a 12.7 (approximately 141.7 mph) for the World of Outlaws. Under 15-flat is not a big deal here. It just shows how good these cars are. To come out with a new car and have them drive this nice off the bat is a pretty nice deal."
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Dillon couldn’t avoid wreck; Bayne tries to make most of 12th-place finish
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Austin Dillon said he “downshifted,” but couldn’t avoid the Toyota of Hal Martin. And while Dillon’s own Chevrolet didn’t look too much worse for wear, the car “was never the same” afterward, the Richard Childress Racing driver said.
Dillon was one of several drivers — a dozen, according to the official post-race results sheet — who failed to escape Bristol Motor Speedway unscathed during the running of the Jeff Foxworthy’s Grit Chips 300.
Five cars were involved in the incident that snared Dillon, which occurred on lap 160 of the 300-lap Nationwide Series race. It began when Martin spun on the frontstretch, slid up into the wall and collected the No. 79 of Jeffrey Earnhardt. Dillon brushed the wall trying to get slowed down, the nudged into Martin’s entry.
“That was unfortunate,” Dillon, who remains sixth in points, said. “You have to account for the fact that you will have days when you just get caught up in something. To come back and finish 11th, I’m really happy with that for a day that could have been really worse.”
"To come back and finish 11th, I’m really happy with that for a day that could have been really worse."
— Austin Dillon
Bayne searches for positives
Local favorite Trevor Bayne, who hails from Knoxville, Tenn., likewise tried to put a positive spin on what was an otherwise forgettable run in the Roush Fenway Racing No. 6 Ford.
“That was a struggle,” Bayne said of his 12th-place finish. “It wasn’t at all what we wanted.”
Bayne, the 2011 Daytona 500 winner, said his team’s car was “not there” from the time the team arrived at BMS.
“That thing was so tight,” he said. “It was unfortunate; we wanted to knock out solid top-fives every week.”
The 12th-place finish did move Bayne from 13th to 12th in the point standings after four events.
Sadler ready to dig out
Elliott Sadler, on the other hand, wasn’t as fortunate, tumbling from third all the way to 10th after engine issues sidelined the Joe Gibbs Racing driver.
“Something internal … let go and I think our rocker or something like that broke; just a tough deal,” Sadler said. “So this puts us in a hole, but we have a lot of racing left to do this season and we’ll try to get some of it back in California."
No regrets for Kes
Brad Keselowski led 26 laps and appeared to have one of the stronger cars. But damage after contact with Regan Smith eventually cut a tire on the Penske Racing Ford.
Keselowski, leading the race, found himself in a heated battle with Kevin Harvick and Smith when Smith, in the JR Motorsports No. 7 Chevrolet, slipped up the track and made contact just shy of the 180-lap mark.
By lap 193, Keselowski was heading to pit road with a shredded left-front tire.
“You can second-guess yourself all the time,” he said when asked if he should have pitted sooner. “I wasn’t going to give up the lead.
“Either way it would have been the same result.”
Keselowski was able to race his way back to 15th, the first car one lap down.
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Defending champion enjoys track’s atmosphere, challenges
BRISTOL, Tenn. — NASCAR Sprint Cup Series teams will roll out onto Bristol Motor Speedway for the season’s fourth stop Sunday, and Brad Keselowski couldn’t be more pleased.
The series’ defending champion has only six career Cup starts on the 0.533-mile track. Two of the last three, however, have seen him parked in Victory Lane at the end of the race.
“I really just love coming here,” Keselowski said. “I love what this track stands for and I love how it races. I think embracing that challenge is part of our success.”
Finishes of fourth, fourth and third in the season’s first three races have Keselowski, 29, trailing five-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson by just five points. Johnson’s been no slouch either, scoring a win, a runner-up and a sixth-place finish to open the year.
Each track on the Cup circuit is unique. Each provides its own set of difficulties. High banks that vary between 24 and 28 degrees and short straightaways provide the ingredients that create the 125-mph speeds at Bristol. When filled with a 43-car field, there’s little room — or time — for error.
Keselowski, driver of the No. 2 Ford for Penske Racing, describes it as “extremely demanding” and compared it to playing the video game Tetris “because it’s such a mental and physical challenge.”
“You never get a break,” he said. “When you finally get that one puzzle piece to fit the next one is coming, and when you think you’ve got it all figured out it just keeps going faster and faster and faster until it just breaks you down mentally, and I love that challenge.”
It is “an in-your-face race track, where if you just ride around here, you wreck,” he said.
Being overly aggressive can result in trouble as well.
And if you try to ride the edge between the two? “You just have a bad day,” Keselowski said. “So that mental challenge, the window is so small, and that’s what I love about it.”
Denny Hamlin won the last time Cup teams competed at Bristol, the first race after the track’s upper groove had been ground away in an attempt to shrink the racing groove and generate more close-quarters competition. Instead of avoiding the high line, however, teams found the fresh pavement took on rubber more quickly and ultimately provided a better groove.
That may not be the case this time.
“I tried (the upper groove) and I hit the wall, so that’s good,” Keselowski said of an opening-practice incident Friday. “I hope that lane doesn’t come in at all. I hate that groove.”
Points leads, strong starts and momentum can be erased with the turn of the steering wheel at Bristol. It’s 500 laps of racing into the unknown.
“Unpredictability kind of lends itself to drivers making mistakes and drivers making mistakes lends itself to action,” said Keselowski, who will start seventh. “So those are the things I think people look for.
“I think that can still happen, whether you have to run the top groove, the bottom groove or whether this track was multi-grooved to begin with.”
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