In what became a fuel mileage race Brad Keselowski held off a late charging Jeff Gordon to win the AAA 400 at Dover International Speedway. In a race that became a lot of long green flag runs and only 4 cautions mostly for debris from Matt Kenseths car as he broke a tire rod or something on his car late in the race.
Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin both were leading towards the end of the race but they had to stop to take fuel with about 10 laps to go. Brad takes over the points lead over Jimmie Johnson by 5 points and 16 points over 3rd place Denny Hamlin.
The only question left was would Brad have enough gas to bring the Miller Lite Dodge to victory lane. As you can se from the picture he had plenty of gas left.
Roger Penske Dedicates the Win To Chris Economaki
In the post race interview team owner Roger Penske dedicated the win to his long time friend Chris Economaki. “First, I want to dedicate this win to Chris Economaki. Obviously I go back probably 45 years with him when I was a driver, used to take his photos home from the track. I remember one thing about him, he cared about the little guy running on the short tracks. I obviously can’t thank him enough for what he did for us. I know he’d be proud today to know that Penske Racing team is dedicating this race to him.”
Jeff Gordon was closing in on Brad and didn’t have to worry about gas. When asked about his day Jeff said “Yes it was a real good run for the Drive to End Hunger Chevrolet and with Chase Credit Card Services being on board, we appreciate them. You know what? Today was a good day; a solid day. The car was good. We were better on the long runs than we were on the short runs. We just couldn’t get going on the restarts. The front tires would just not work. I don’t know; maybe the splitter was hitting or something. So we had issues with that. We were trying to resolve those and it actually worked to our favor because we had to come in and top-off and make a couple of adjustments and then we didn’t have to save fuel there at the end and the car was really good. I thought me and Mark Martin were going to battle it out for the win. He was chasing me down there and those other guys were saving fuel; all but the No. 2 (Keselowski) car and we just came up a little bit short. All in all, it was a great day.”
Jimmie Johnson had to conserve fuel at the end and was just barely running at the end. When asked about it Jimmie said
“Well, for starters, we’re not very good at fuel mileage races. So, when I heard that, I’m like man, we’re in big trouble. And he asked me to start saving fuel. And I doubled the distance out of the gate just to make sure that I did enough to get us to the end. So, it’s tough; it really is. But we have a handful of races that come down to it each year and we’ve worked to get better at it. And this is like the second of 15 or something that we’ve attempted to finish in a low fuel situation and got it done. So I’m improving and we’re improving. I wish we could have raced for it. We finally got control of the race, late, but it just didn’t unfold like a normal race here.
“In this sport, with as many races as we have and as many types of races that we have, it’s real tough to control your foot and not stand on the gas and try to keep them behind you. But it is what it is. You’ve got to be good on all fronts and we did a decent job today.”
Photo courtesy of NASCARMedia
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