“You’re just on pins and needles all the time on restarts, like ‘uhhhh, I don’t want to lose any ground.’ Boy, if I have a big slip, I’m going to lose all kinds of track position, which happened over and over”. “And he drove right on past me and I was like, ‘Well, all righty then’. They’re always nasty races, you know”.
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Brad Keselowski won his second NASCAR Sprint Cup race in a row for Team Penske, and fourth of the year, at Kentucky in a tense final lap battle with Joe Gibbs Racing’s Carl Edwards.
“That was something”, Keselowski said. “It’s just the way it goes, I guess”. “That’s what won us the race”. After any track is repaved, teams need as much track time as possible to dial in their cars to adapt to the changes.
As Edwards moved up on Keselowski’s bumper, the latter took off, and held off the charge to win on Saturday. “He played it perfectly”.
“We’ve got Loudon coming up, which has been good to me, and then a few weeks here to go back to my home track”. Those are great engines.
After Kenseth pitted, Keselowski then held an eight-second lead over Carl Edwards in a race to also save fuel.
Whenever there are those discrepancies, I think thats when you see mistakes and when you see strengths and weaknesses that vary from auto to vehicle and driver to driver, the 2012 champion said before practice.
“I thought I was out”, said Keselowski.
Harvick and Truex had cars capable of winning but circumstances derailed their bids. This is especially true since opportunities to score a lot of points in the place differential category are limited because the field was set by owner points, putting all the top drivers up front. But NASCAR slapped him with a passing penalty as he speed up approaching his pit stall. He was 23rd on the restart. He gained two more spots over the next 10 and was running third with 25 laps to go. Based on his excellent practice times, Truex looks poised for another dominating showing Saturday night. “We went all the way to third place from the back”. “We finished fifth, so that was a good rebound from when we showed up here at Kentucky”. It’s just one of those deals.
“It’s a pretty helpless feeling being out of gas with guys behind you”. It’s easy for us to blame Goodyear; they panicked when they did the test here and got blisters so they brought the hardest thing they had…. But 14 laps later, his brake rotor failed and Logano crashed into Turn 4.
Drivers offered a bit of mixed reaction after the race.
Six cautions for crashes in the first 100 laps.
LOGANO’S BAD DAY: Joey Logano almost wrecked on the first lap – and the race never got better after that.
It seems unbearable at times to hit the “ON” button and turn on the TV. Elliott and Blaney were together in one while Scott and Buescher (and others) were wadded up in another. Truex has one win this year as well.
With track conditions at Kentucky slick after a weekend of rain, drivers were sliding early at the 2016 Quaker State 400, as they aimed to make passes on the track.
Kentucky Speedway resurfaced and reconfigured its 1.5-mile tri-oval track to create two distinctive corners. On Lap 32, Jimmie Johnson spun through Turn 4 and crumpled the left rear quarter of his No. 48 Chevrolet.
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Given the 2014 champions consistency this season, Harvick seems likely to figure it out. The driver of the No. 22 Team Penske Ford blew a right front tire on Lap 53 and crashed into the wall.
