Hamlin closes out the Sprint Cup regular season with his third victory of the year.
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All 13 race winners from the regular season qualified into the postseason and three drivers made it in on points. McMurray’s seventh-place finish left him comfortably ahead of Newman, who ended up 28th.
Pole-sitter Austin Dillon led the first 51 laps, but Busch led virtually the rest of the way, relinquishing the top spot to Jones for two laps during green flag pit stops.
He goes into Saturday night’s race with an 11-point lead over David Ragan for 30th in the standings.
The rough-and-tumble short track race featured a track record 16 cautions, surpassing the previous high of 15 set three times.
Kyle Larson finished second, followed by Martin Truex Jr., Brad Keselowski and Kevin Harvick.
“Yeah, that’s what’s so special about it (is) you get to do it home”, said Hamlin, who won at RIR for the third time, and the first in six years. You have to get good finishes over the next 10 weeks in order to advance.
“I see all the extra Denny Hamlin shirts and hats and everything, and it fires me up every time I’m here”, he said in victory lane. “Trying to figure out the ideal scenarios so that we can race into the Chase and then move through the Chase”. Denny Hamlin, Matt Kenseth, Jimmie Johnson, Joey Logano, Kurt Busch, Kyle Larson and Tony Stewart are all locked in. Kasey Kahne ran sixth. The 15th caution led to a 20-minute red flag for extensive track clean-up after a wreck that started with contact between Ryan Newman and Tony Stewart. It’s just ridiculous. I only hit him in Turn 1 when he cut across my nose. “It’s unfortunate. But we shouldn’t expect anything less from him”.
“[It’s] just disappointing that you have somebody old like that that should be retired the way he drives”.
Stewart had a different perspective. I’m encouraged by the speed of the cars and hope to have a trouble-free night and that the race is just a normal race, you don’t get hung out by a caution or have something happen.
“I’d say by that, he probably doesn’t want to be friends right now”, Stewart said. I don’t do that to him. “Three times, that’s two more times than I normally let someone run into me”. There was once early in the race that nobody saw.
Stewart, who rallied from well behind in the Chase in 2011 to overtake Carl Edwards and win his third Cup title, shook off Newman’s blast with a couple of quips and addressed the topic of momentum. “He’ll get his wish. We are coming out here to race aggressively for every position, every point we can possibly get, without taking unnecessary risk”.
The highlight of the long evening was a no-holds-barred interview from Ryan Newman after he was eliminated from Chase contention when his fellow Hoosier, ?
Still, JGR’s Hamlin refuses to call himself or any of his fellow Toyota drivers a favorite for the 10-race Chase. We got involved in one of the accidents, had a tire go down, just a very eventful day. It wasn’t anything like winning a race but it is just as big in a difference sense.
“I thought for sure we had too many laps on our tires”, Hamlin said to NASCAR. “I can’t thank my guys for working as hard as they did”.
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“A lot of the guys that we were challenging only had one lap per session, but my auto didn’t really come in that quick, so I had to run multiple laps”. The defending Sprint Cup Series champion led 197 of 250 laps en route to his 84th victory in the series.
