Kurt Busch started from the pole position and led for the first 31 laps – and Kyle Busch led for 38 laps down the stretch – but neither could hold off a late charge by Brad Keselowski in the 267-lap race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
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But Keselowski didn’t appear to have enough vehicle to beat Kyle Busch, on fresher tires and whose daring move from sixth to first with 44 laps remaining included his blowing by Keselowski and Logano in the process.
Logano finished second and Jimmie Johnson came in third under weird and windy weather conditions. Rain and high winds delayed the start of the race. It was his second career win at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Light rain and heavy winds surrounded the track on Sunday. “I felt like we had a really good shot when we got out front like that, but the vibration just got so bad it wouldn’t turn anymore”. Brad Keselowski, Austin Dillon, Greg Biffle, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Kyle Larson and AJ Allmendinger were all caught speeding at various points in the race – with Biffle, Stenhouse and Larson flagged on the same pit stop in the same segment.
Brad Keselowski hit the jackpot and took home the checkered flag Sunday in one of the wackiest races in NASCAR history. “It wasn’t a win, but we were doing a good job doing what we need to do to keep top-fiving it – and the wins will come”. Keselowski recieved a pit road speeding penalty, and it seemed as if his chances at victory were also diminished. There was a lot of misfortune, and then there was a lot of self-inflicted things that I could have done better and beyond.
“We had awesome speed at the end of every run”, Keselowski, who rebounded from a pit-road speeding penalty earlier in the race, said. “Took a long time to get by Joey”.
While Kyle’s Xfinity victory is a good omen, Kurt Busch also is in position for a big Sunday after winning pole for the second straight week and setting the track speed record. We race each other hard but clean. At one point, a dust storm rose on the outskirts of the track, obscuring the view of nearby Nellis Air Force Base. “There at the end, I didn’t know if a tire was coming off or what”.
Busch finished fourth in the opener of NASCAR’s three-week Southwest swing, as he fell a few laps shy of completing a weekend sweep.
One would imagine that the added difficulty will only further benefit those that have already adapted well to the new package, though a curveball like this is bad news for the likes of polesitter Kurt Busch, who went from knowing he had one of the best cars for the race to having to hope he and his Stewart-Haas Racing team can acclimate and adapt quickly enough to remain competitive. “Some are good on short runs and some are good on long runs, and we had a really good long-run auto today”, Keselowski said. That is pitiful. We have run three races and finished one. In a series populated by more seasoned racers and Sprint Cup regulars, the nineteen-year-old has scored finishes of seventh, eleventh, and sixth in 2016. It got so tight… that was the tightest we were all day. Kevin Harvick is the March defending race victor at the track, and heads into next week as the all but odds-on favorite.
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Finally, a mistake didn’t prove as costly as Keselowski had thought on a day that was full of weirdness with wind gusts of 40 miles per hour and blowing drizzle forcing a 25-minute delay to start the race.
