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.”