SPARTA, Ky. – Adapting adroitly to a new competition package for NASCAR Sprint Cup Series cars, Kyle Busch sped to victory in Saturday night’s Quaker State 400 at Kentucky Speedway, taking a giant step toward the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup with his second victory since returning from an 11-race injury absence.
Busch won for the 31st time in his career and the second time at the 1.5-mile track. Race runner-up Joey Logano was the only interloper in a top five that also included all four Joe Gibbs Racing drivers—Busch, Denny Hamlin in third, Carl Edwards in fourth and Matt Kenseth in fifth.
Busch grabbed the lead from Logano after several laps of intense racing, taking the point at the stripe on Lap 248 and clearing Logano’s Ford through Turn 2 on Lap 249 of 267. From that point, Busch pulled away to win by 1.594 seconds.
The new aero package, in Busch’s view was a benefit as he closed on Logano in a race that saw a track-record 22 green-flag passes for the lead.
"All the drivers were kind of striving for this," Busch said. "I felt like it was a positive thing when I was chasing Joey down. Right when I got to him, he moved up and tried to block my lane. With the old package, you’d get stalled out, and get stuck behind the guy. I just moved down and went a little bit lower and got my Camry to stick and was able to power through and get back by him.
"We swapped the lead back and forth a couple times. I thought it was pretty good racing. You don’t want to spend too much time racing around and putting on too good of a show for the fans to take yourself out of a win. I thought that was a really good race, at least it wasn’t a guy who checked out on the last run and you didn’t see a pass for the lead coming down the final stretch."
Long a proponent of lower downforce, Edwards was even more effusive in his praise of the new package.
"This package, we need to keep going in this direction," Edwards said. "We could race closer together—I was steering right. We were using the whole car. We just need to keep taking downforce away. It was an awesome show. Just an awesome, fun day and I’m glad Kyle got the win."
Busch led a race-high 163 laps, scoring a maximum 48 points and moving to 35th in the standings, 87 points behind Cole Whitt in 30th. Busch must finish the first 26 races in the top 30 in order to be eligible for the Chase.(Reid Spencer, NASCAR Media)
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