Busch didn’t give up the lead and earned his first win of the season. Logano managed the precarious conditions superbly, leading 138 of 200 laps to score a dominating victory.
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“Each and every week, there are 12 to 15 guys with a shot to win”, said Kyle Busch, who leads the top series with three victories.
Logano, who started from the pole, hadn’t won since last season’s fall race at Talladega, 18 races ago.
“There’s some good people coming in”, Kenseth said May 15 after narrowly beating Larson and Elliott for the win at Dover. “But, all-in-all, everybody kept their heads up and kept digging, and we got a good finish out of it”.
Elliott finished a career-best second, followed by Kyle Larson, Brad Keselowski and Kevin Harvick at Michigan International Speedway.
If you’re an aspiring driver learning how to excel on restarts, make sure you study the hell out of Joey Logano’s win at MI on Sunday. He quickly recovered, racing back up to fourth before the caution came out again on lap 155.
Logano had a comfortable lead over Elliott, the Sunoco Rookie of the Year leader, when Denny Hamlin popped his left rear tire on the frontstretch and careened into the inside wall near the entrance to turn one.
Elliott, 20, son of NASCAR legend Bill Elliott, blamed himself for a missed gearshift on a late restart that could have meant the difference between finishing runner up to Logano and winning his first Cup race. On that, Elliott had a poor restart and was bumped from behind by Truex Jr.
And given that chance on Sunday, Logano took advantage.
It all started on Friday, when Stewart qualified third for the 2016 FireKeepers 400.
“You can’t blame anybody”, he said. Completely my fault. The guys gave me a great vehicle today. “This whole NAPA group has been working so hard these past few weeks”. “You can’t do dumb stuff and win these races”, he said. Putting it in the correct gear would be a good start.. “I’ve got only six months more of these stupid restarts”.
“I felt like we had a really good opportunity to control the rest of the race if we had good restarts and good time on pit road”, he said. “It all kind of came together”. He also didn’t race in the more pivotal moments, where drivers either got more confident or more desperate as the race wore on.
Starting in the second row behind polesitter Joey Logana and Martin Trueux Jr.is the retiring Tony Stewart. The fire ended his day. “I was signing an autograph and my hand was shaking”, he said. “It had been shaking pretty bad and going south for a while and it had been building its own heat”.
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Free-flowing racing didn’t last long. “It’s wonderful you see some of those guys that are coming in how good they are, and particularly with Chase today and Larson, as well, here recently how fast he’s been”. NASCAR now finds itself in a generational transition, as mainstays Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart either have retired or will do so at the conclusion of the current season, and stars such as Kevin Harvick (age 40), Jimmie Johnson (40), Dale Earnhardt Jr.
