Kenseth raced to his first victory of the season and denied Larson his first career win. It was his first win of the season, and third-career win at Dover. Larson believed he had the best vehicle at the end but just couldn’t force Kenseth into making a costly mistake. It seemed only to be a matter of time before he would overcome Kenseth.
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Johnson also was involved in some earlier trouble when he and Kevin Harvick, two of the pre-race favorites to win, suffered setbacks on Lap 213, but avoided what could have been far worse for both of them at the time.
He was responsible for a pileup straight out of the Talladega Superspeedway highlight reel that knocked out a slew of drivers who raced up front all race and brought it to a halt with less than 50 laps left. When he found himself trailing C.E. Falk III on the final lap, he first tried to move him out of his way before ultimately spinning him to steal the win. He’s sitting in Victory Lane and I’m not, so maybe I need to do something a little bit different, but nothing insane to take him out or anything… maybe use the bumper a little bit. “We are trying two different rules packages. but it’s really just a test session, not a lot of cars here or rubber on the track”.
“I think the last 20 laps is about as good as anybody could drive a racecar, ” Gibbs said. “So I was just going to try and race him as hard as I could without getting into him to beat him”. I got another shot there at the end, but I came up a little bit short. But we’ve been building better racecars, I think.
While Larson took the setback in seemingly somewhat in stride, he clearly was the driver to watch throughout the later laps of the race. This took out Tony Stewart and race leader Martin Truex Jr. just barely saved control of his auto. Larson seemed to have the fastest auto of the bunch throughout the race, but wasn’t able to overcome the tough track conditions late to overtake Kenseth when given the chance. “We were fortunate to be able to hold him off”. Looking back, I made a mistake in how I went about it.
Larson’s team owner Chip Ganassi was all smiles walking away from the series 2014 Rookie of the Year on pit road. Larson led 85 laps – and certainly gained the respect of the competition as he made his charge to the front. But one lap later Edwards slammed viciously into the inside backstretch wall following contact with Larson. Edwards, when told of the remark, brushed off the incident as hard racing after initially being upset about it. He possibly could have wrecked Kenseth at some point for the lead but would rather wait beyond 87 career starts to win a race clean as opposed to in any way possible.
“Kyle gave me all I wanted at the end, and then some”, Kenseth said. “We can’t see nothing, really, when you get stacked up like that on a racetrack”, Logano said. “I respect Matt Kenseth a lot”.
“The cars are good and the pit crew has been doing an awesome job”.
“I had gotten close to his bumper a couple times”, Larson said.
WHACK!: Brad Keselowski raced at or near the front for much of the race but fell back after he hit the lapped auto of Austin Dillon on lap 280. He’s a great race auto driver. I didn’t want to do anything dirty.
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If there was a down moment for Larson, it was probably when he got into the back of Carl Edwards, which he felt bad about. “He’s a really, really clean, hard racer, and a fast learner”.
