To the surprise of no one this week at Martinsville Matt Kenseth appears to have taken action to Joey Logano dumping him a few weeks ago. I was thinking it would come at Texas but it looks like today was the day.
Matt Kenseth
Matt Kenseth Wins at Kentucky
Matt Kenseth won the Quaker State 400 at Kentucky Speedway after some misfortune by the dominant car of the race. Jimmie Johnson had lead most of the day until some pit stop strategy combined with a bad restart with only a handful of laps left put him back into 25th place on the last restart.
It was Matt’s 4th win of the year and basically puts him in a great place to make the Chase for the Championship. Once they got restarted he led the final 20 or so laps to the victory. The race changed very early when Dale Earnhardt Jr and Jimmie Johnson hit the piece of the tire that came off Denny Hamlin’s car when he got a flat. While Jr’s car was great in the beginning of the race the damage the tire caused was too much for the crew to fix properly. Here is that replay!
The next big event that happened was Kurt Busch unintentionally causing a crash that took out Brad Keselowski, Greg Biffle and more. Kurt accepted responsibility but the other drivers didn’t care as the damage was done. Brad got out of the car very slowly but he appears to be ok. He did take some shot from Biffle and hit the wall hard while getting hit again. Why Kurt was using the apron so early in the race is something that he is probably questioning himself.
The save of the day has to go to Kyle Busch who spun in the middle of traffic and didn’t hit anything. He came back to finish the race in 5th. Great job by everyone involved especially Kyle.
While Jimmie Johnson who finished 9th was still mad over the last restart. “I don’t know. We were kind of in an awkward situation in that restart there. And then we were like three and four wide going in the corner, then something happened with the air and just kind of turned me around. Unfortunate, but at least we rallied back for a good finish. The No. 20 (Matt Kenseth) broke the pace car speed, which you aren’t supposed to, but, they aren’t calling guys on that so I need to start trying that in the future.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr spoke after the race about his car and the damage the tire did to his race chances. “The guys did a good job on pit road all day long working on it and trying to fix everything. I’m not sure we got everything back where it is supposed to be, but we did well-enough to get a decent finish out it. Just proud of how hard the team worked. Did a good job for qualifying, and put a good car out there for the race. Can’t do anything about what happened out there on the race track with that casing. They worked hard on it to get it right, and get it good enough where we could run well. So, they deserve a lot of credit today.”
Jamie McMurray had a great day and finished second! “Overall I felt like it was a very good day. I didn’t feel like we ran significantly better today than the past ten or 12 weeks. We were able to get the finish out of it. We didn’t have any flat tires or radiators break or people’s parts fall off the car and go through our radiator. It was a good day; got a little unlucky on the last restart with the bottom line checking up, and then our car was just about as good as it had been all day on the last run.”
Matt Kenseth Wins The Daytona 500
In a race that was suppose to be started and finished on Sunday Matt Kenseth held off a late charging Dale Earnhardt Jr to win the Daytona 500. When the race started more fans were worried about rain but it was a fire that everyone will remember. With 40 laps to go Juan Pablo Montoya had scary crash with a jet dryer in which everyone involved was fortunate to escape with just minor injuries.
There was many stories to cover during this race since five time Sprint cup champion Jimmie Johnson was involved in a wreck early which also damaged Danica Patrick’s car badly. Last years winner Trevor Bayne was also involved in an accident and wasn’t a factor in the finish. We also had Jeff Gordon’s engine blow up unexpectedly which caused many fans to wonder about Hendricks engines.
The Daytona 500 started on a Monday and ended on a Tuesday for the first time in history. The 2 hour red flag condition was both scary with dealing with jet fuel on fire and dealing with getting people to safety. The driver of the jet dryer seemed to be more shaken up than Juan Pablo Montoya which tells us how great the safety features are on the Car of Tomorrow. Kind of funny calling this car that but the foam inside the doors of the new car showed us how important it is to focus on safety. Juan Pablo didn’t hit a safer barrier, he ran into a solid metal truck full of jet fuel. The jet dryer driver had no idea he was about to be in a wreck
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