Although he missed 11 races, Busch was granted a waiver from NASCAR, making him eligible as long as he won a race and finished the regular season within the top 30 in points.
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Busch completed an improbable and often painful comeback Sunday night at Homestead-Miami Speedway, outgunning the three other Championship 4 contenders to win his first NASCAR Cup title.
Busch won four races after his return and celebrated the birth of his first child.
Gibbs’ oldest son, J.D., is president of Joe Gibbs Racing.
Add Kyle Busch to the list of fact-is-stranger-than-truth NASCAR champions.
But it did little to dampen the four-time NASCAR champion’s day, which was filled with family, friends and farewell tributes. “I’ve never dreamed anything so little could be so happy, but he’s such a cool little dude”. While Gordon was disappointed he did not win the championship himself, he spoke highly of the new Sprint Cup Series champion.
“I don’t know if I quite understand life yet, but there’s something to be said about this year”, an emotional Busch said on his team radio.
“It’s really awesome, awesome, awesome”, he continued.
His title is the first for Toyota, which joined the Sprint Cup Series in 2007 and had shots at championships but came up empty again and again.
“With 30 (laps) to go, I was like, ‘I’m going to throw up, ‘” she said. Yeah, so I mean, it seems like he’s matured a lot, and he has, but he’s still pretty young.
“The 18 auto just had us beat all night, for the most part”, Harvick said.
“She had never seen me like that”, he said.
In Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race, Larson took out a season of frustration on the field on Saturday in the finale, tracking down Austin Dillon in the closing laps to win the Ford EcoBoost 300 by slightly less than a second.
And then finally it was time to get the show on the road, and the cars streamed off pit road and got to work. Gordon was preparing to race in his first Daytona 500.
Gordon departs as one of NASCAR’s all-time greats, albeit one who was also one of the sport’s most polarizing figures, especially early in his career.
At the front, the lead was proving to be something of a poisoned chalice and hard to hold on to for very long.
MWR, which still has David Ragan in the race, suffered a multitude of problems in nine full seasons. It took a victory, Kyle Busch’s fifth of the season, to win the Cup, and Kevin Harvick’s 13th second-place finish wasn’t enough. Driver Marco Andretti noted after the tests that the NASCAR lap record at the Phoenix mile is 25.1 seconds but the IndyCar lap record set by Arie Luyendyk in 1996 is 19.068 seconds, an average of 183.599 miles per hour.
At the half way point – Lap 134 – Logano led Busch by 3 seconds and Harvick by 8.5 seconds. He had six races to pass that second obstacle.
Well, it was Busch and Gibbs that toppled Harvick. 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.
Those were the final scheduled pit stops.
But he needs help now as Busch and Harvick pull away. That is all that really matters to me. I didn’t want Harvick behind me. I thought going into today we had something for them. “I don’t know what he did, but he came out of it even better than he was before”. The effort to develop the high line hadn’t borne fruit and now the pace simply wasn’t there when it was most needed. His team was back on-track in three laps, and he was eventually able to get back on the lead lap and ultimately finished 10th. Truex meanwhile finished the day in an entirely creditable 12th place behind JGR’s Carl Edwards, having given it his spirited all.
NO REPEAT: At the start of the Chase, a confident Kevin Harvick said about the dominant Joe Gibbs Racing drivers, “We’re going to pound them into the ground”. My wife was there to power me through and my dog, Lucy, was barking at me to get me through it, too. It’s fun to be able to run like this.
QUOTE OF THE DAY, No. 2: “I don’t know if you could have ever scripted it any better”. Congratulations to the No. 18 team and everything they did and all of our guys; they’ve done a great job all year.
The 2014 champion even smiled while watching Busch’s emotions during the post-race celebration, saying “It’s just exciting”. His teammate Keselowski overcame an early race pit penalty for too many men over the wall. “We felt like we had to take a really big swing at it”.
The fourth Chase driver, Martin Truex Jr of Furniture Row Racing., was 12th. “It was a big deal for us and I wish we could have performed better today”.
“We just struggled all night”, Harvick said.
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Busch, who opened the season in a hospital bed, needled his coach after the race that perhaps he shouldn’t have rushed to sign the deal.
