Under NASCAR’s new Chase format, Busch won this year’s Cup championship after only 25 of the 36 starts, the least in NASCAR’s 66-year history.
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Kyle Busch completed his remarkable comeback season Sunday with a win in the Ford Ecoboost 400 to seal the Sprint Cup Championship at Homestead-Miami.
It was an improbable way to finish the season, especially since he missed the first 11 races after suffering a broken right leg and left ankle a day before the season-opening Daytona 500.
On paper, you could look towards Gordon’s 93 race wins and four championships (third and fourth on the all-time win list, respectively).
When pitting cycled through, Logano led, Busch was second, Harvick sixth, Truex 11th and Gordon 12th. Kurt won the title in 2004. He led exactly one lap last season. I thought going into today’s race, we had something for them.
“My vehicle would be good for two laps and then it would really go kind of haywire, and cars would start sort of attacking me”, Gordon said.
“I was just terrified that he was really, really in bad shape”, said crew chief Adam Stevens.
A silver lining was the Xfinity Series championship won Saturday at Homestead by Roush Fenway driver Chris Buescher, who beat Chase Elliott by 15 points.
To take home NASCAR’s greatest prize, Busch needed to finish ahead of the three other Championship 4 drivers – Kevin Harvick, Jeff Gordon and Martin Truex Jr. – in the final race of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup at Homestead.
At the start of the Chase, a confident Harvick said about the dominant Joe Gibbs Racing drivers, “We’re going to pound them into the ground”.
“We’re going to do a lot of things together; he’s not going to drive the race vehicle, but he’s going to be in the booth and he’s going to help us with the team and we’re going to get to do some things together that we haven’t had time to do”, Hendrick said.
“I’m obviously a little disappointed in the way we ran this weekend”, Truex said.
His 2,294 laps led (22 percent of the laps raced the entire season) were 863 more than second-place Joey Logano.
Jeff Gordon climbed out of his race vehicle and stepped into the waiting arms of team owner Rick Hendrick. At 84,000 unique views of the race on NBC Sports Live Extra, that resulted in a 126% rise over average viewership of NBC’s previous Sprint Cup races this season. It opened the door for Gordon to grab his ninth career Martinsville victory and an automatic berth into Sunday’s final four.
“The rehab and the getting back and the getting ready, healed and focused, all that was the hardest part, the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through”, said Busch.
Busch’s biggest battle this season was personal, just as it was with Neil Bonnett in late 1987 and Darrell Waltrip in 1990 when severe leg injuries took them out of action for a time. He might have won a fourth-straight race if he had not run out of gas on the final lap at Pocono Raceway. Lotus teams have been in financial jeopardy for most of the season and a deal for a takeover by Renault is expected to be finalized after the Abu Dhabi race.
But Harvick fell one point shy of repeating as champion.
“It wasn’t even that I could stand on one foot and just try to put weight through my other one”, he said. A random spark caught the race fuel and the area around the vehicle nozzle briefly went up in flames. I powered on through all of that to get better, to go through rehab and become stronger mentally and physically. “I am not sure what we were missing, but we were missing something”.
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Gordon did, walking through driver introductions holding the right hand of his 8-year-old daughter, Ella.
