“Doesn’t really matter what I say”. If he would have snuck outside of me, it would have been over.
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Matt Kenseth held off Kyle Larson in a thrilling run down the stretch to win a wreck-filled race Sunday at Dover International Speedway.
Kenseth picked up his first win of the season in the AAA 400 Drive for Autism, but this race will be remembered for the “Big One” and other carnage.
Kenseth led 48 of the race’s 400 laps and Larson was in front for 85. Elliott, the second-generation rookie who replaced Jeff Gordon in the No. 24, made an aggressive run and briefly passed Larson for second.
But throughout the madness Kenseth has shown the same speed his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates have had en route to six wins. The hope hopefully good day for the fans out I think it’s a lot better than that as far as race to the finish. With four laps to go, it looked like it would only be a few laps before he took the lead from Kenseth.
Even with some of the top cars wrinkled up or already in the garage, Kenseth couldn’t breathe easy. Hamlin got back on the lead lap during a lap 173 debris caution and then got on a different pit sequence that got him back to the front. “We had such a fast auto, I thought we were going to win this thing”.
Over the closing laps of the race, Elliott took part in an exciting three-way fight for the victory, a battle that saw three drivers put on an exhibition of racing that was simultaneously aggressive and squeaky clean, a textbook example of what quintessential NASCAR racing really is.
The 44-year-old Kenseth is older than the combined ages of Elliott, 20, and the 23-year-old Larson.
Larson battled Kenseth hard for several laps before Kenseth was able to get away, leaving Larson to battle Elliott for second. Have a lot of fundraising has gathered him like saves them they can not get the job done be so close that school will keep digging at it and trying to get a little better.
Kenseth was the leader on the race’s final restart and kept the lead over Larson, who had one of the fastest cars over the second half of the race.
The event that defined the race came on a restart with 57 laps to go. He finished 15th. 10-time Dover victor Jimmie Johnson started the wreck when his transmission locked up on a restart.
But he knows just how unfair the racing gods can get, and knows that, just because he had lost the Daytona 500 after leading on the last lap and continued to have fast cars, the cruelty of racing could keep him out of Victory Lane.
“As soon as I went to second and tried to go to third. there was a long pause there where I couldn’t get in a gear, and then I was locked out completely”, Johnson said. In addition to Johnson, the accident took out Kevin Harvick, the race’s early dominator, and Martin Truex Jr.
The field restarted with 35 laps to go, with everybody in the top seven looking for their first win of the season.
As the field attempted to restart with only 46 laps remaining after a caution, Jimmie Johnson was unable to shift into high gear causing cars to pile up behind him.
Aric Almirola was one of the ddrivers caught up in the melee, and the Richard Petty Motorsports driver may have caught the worst of it.
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“I was trying to get myself in a position where if they were racing to get a big run and just try to choose a lane that nobody was in, which is hard to do when those guys are side-by-side racing for the lead”, Elliott said.
