Jeff Gordon’s legendary career is over.
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Kyle Busch, whose season was almost derailed before it got started, won NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series championship Sunday, winning the season-ending Ford EcoBoost 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway in the process.
The 30-year old Busch will officially accept his championship trophy and check at the Sprint Cup Awards Banquet in less than two weeks in his hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada. He clinched Roush Fenway’s third Xfinity driver’s title in the last five years; Stenhouse Jr. won it in 2011 and 2012. Only one other set of brothers, Terry and Bobby Labonte, has each won championships. The championship was the first Sprint Cup title for Toyota and the fourth for Joe Gibbs Racing.
Busch also joins older brother, Kurt, as a NASCAR champion. Not in different sports it’s never happened to me.
Finishing with a comeback story that couldn’t have been scripted, Kyle Busch takes his first NASCAR Cup Title…
“It’s really awesome, awesome, awesome”, he continued. “I wouldn’t change anything the way that it happened this year; certainly was a dream come true even though we went through all the tragedy … beginning the year with a broken leg and everything”. Adam Stevens (crew chief) prepared such a great race auto.
(Busch) “I was really anxious”. I powered on through all of that to get better, to go through rehab and become stronger mentally and physically.
“I’ve been so slammed”, he said. Jeff Gordon took third overall in his final season as a driver. He has been paired up with organizations such as Drive To End Hunger, one of his sponsors, to help provide food for people in need and his foundation, the Jeff Gordon Children’s Foundation, is devoted to finding a cure for pediatric cancer. When it was over, Gordon thanked his crew and Hendrick over the team radio and then made his final turn down pit road.
IndyCar legend Mario Andretti, who also has a Daytona 500 win and a Formula One championship to his credit, was basking in Gordon’s limelight.
Denny Hamlin started the race from the pole but was quickly overtaken by Joey Logano. Also, there were seven cautions.
Harvick failed in his bid to win back-to-back Sprint Cup championships, settling for yet another runner-up finish.
At Homestead, Gordon faced Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr.
With 54 laps to go, Truex took another gamble by pitting early while running 14th. Sometime-Missourian Clint Bowyer was caught up in a multi-car crash on the 45 lap and finished last in his final race with Michael Waltrip Racing, which is going out of business.
On Lap 20, just after a restart, Busch took the lead away from Logano. “Just let it come to you, ‘” Busch said. As the night went, I just couldn’t find anywhere that would make the auto run better. On the first attempt, Brad Keselowski tried to shoot the gap on Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, which ultimately left Gordon with a cut tire, a 29th-place finish and elimination from the Chase, since he could not win at Phoenix the week after. In the end, the adjustments were never quite enough. The effort to develop the high line hadn’t borne fruit and now the pace simply wasn’t there when it was most needed. 5 seconds. Five laps later, the lead was over a second. Gordon had managed to stay consistent throughout the whole day before he began to get a lot of breaks.
“It’s been a great couple of years and I’m looking forward to next year”. It’s fun to be able to run like this. After previous year, I felt like we had everything go our way way and tonight, it didn’t go our way. Congratulations to the No. 18 team and everything they did and all of our guys; they’ve done a great job all year.
“Just really proud of everybody and just didn’t have it tonight”. He was aware of Harvick, who was fourth on the restart and right behind him.
“She walked in and we started hugging and talking”, he said. “We just kept powering through and doing as much as we could, as quick as we could, and we were able to power through and get back”. We had a bad pit stop under green and lost more there, so it was too little, too late. He worked his butt off. His physical therapist would leave and he’d be like, ‘Ok, get my (stretching) bands, we’re going to do more. It was a big deal for us and I wish we could have performed better today.
Jeff Gordon waits backstage with his daughter, Ella, for the driver introductions at the NASCAR Sprint Cup race Sunday, November 22, 2015, at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla.
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However, unlike the others races of the season, laps lead is merely a statistic in the finale of the 10-month long NASCAR season.
