He didn’t win another NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship in his final race.
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But that’s exactly what happened Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway, with Busch pulling off another unlikely victory in the Ford EcoBoost 400 – his fifth of the season – to clinch his first career championship.
Busch’s victory also was full of emotion, the cap to a year that included major injuries suffered at Daytona worldwide Speedway in February – he broke his right leg and foot in a crash – and the birth of his first child.
“This is pretty unbelievable”. “A dream come true”. “It probably cost me or Brad a win, but it did make it somewhat exciting at the end”.
“It used to be you didn’t want to have kids because it took the fire out of you from driving the vehicle, and now it seems to have calmed a lot of us down to the point where we can focus and do the things that we need to do to concentrate on our jobs”. Busch got the jump in the first turn and easily cleared Keselowski.
Chase Elliott, the son of 1988 Sprint Cup champion Bill Elliott and just shy of his 20th birthday, will replace Gordon in the No. 24 Chevy of Hendrick Motorsports.
“All he’s been through this year, nobody’s more deserving than him”, Gordon said about the new champion. I wanted that win, but we’re still going to celebrate. “Last year at this race, I was throwing up because I was pregnant”.
JGR also fields Cup entries for Busch, Denny Hamlin, Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth.
It’s a well-known fact that Jeff Gordon is not totally leaving racing, as he has already signed on to do race commentary with Fox in 2016, following in the footsteps of many great racers like Dale Jarrett and Darrell Waltrip to the press booth.
Gordon started to lose it as Hendrick whispered in his ear, but managed to keep his composure.
NASCAR officials say they won’t start the race unless they believe they can finish it. They also have no plans to alter their current race rules, meaning the finale could be deemed official any time after the halfway point in the 400-mile race. To only finish outside the top-10 eight times is nearly as unreal. 5 seconds. Five laps later, the lead was over a second.
On Lap 89, Logano blew past Busch to take second place.
While Harvick blasted through to second, by the time he got there Busch was already out of reach. Truex was ninth and Gordon had dropped back to 14th.
It didn’t happen, mostly because Gordon fought an ill-handling race auto all afternoon. (11 behind): Wasn’t a factor, finishing 12th.
Nine months ago, it looked like Kyle Busch’s season was over before it had even started.
In theory, the Chase format, now in its second year (terrible twos?), adds that extra level of pressure and ups the stakes.
With 100 laps to go, another yellow flag waved.
Harvick restarted third and Busch fourth. The soldier not the lead 46 laps and finished second in the Stewart Haas racing Chevrolet AT Kearney just. During all this, Gordon sat 10th. Though he took a few criticism over questionable decisions in Gordon’s final season, Gustafson always showed pride in working for the No. 24 team and knew when to take chances in order to secure a win. Busch came in with 51 laps to go.
Those were the final scheduled pit stops.
And then finally it was time to get the show on the road, and the cars streamed off pit road and got to work. But behind Busch, Larson was moving in on Busch.
Busch was second on the restart with seven laps remaining.
The leaders all pitted for tires. “But on the other hand I am proud about how far this Furniture Row team progressed this season. I’m just so glad that he’s part of my life”.
Out front Busch began pulling away. “We had a lot of trouble getting up off the corner and putting the power down”. “Unfortunately, it’s just one short”.
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“I had such a blast knowing that we had a good race vehicle and could battle with these guys”, he said. “To put it all together here tonight, this night wasn’t quite that hard”.
