Another Coca-Cola 600, another dominant performance for the winning car. Kurt Busch backed up last week’s All-Star win with a dominating performance Saturday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway to win NASCAR’s longest race. Busch became only the seventh driver to win the All-Star Race and the Coca-Cola 600 in back-to-back weeks, joining the ranks of Dale Earnhardt and Darrel Waltrip. Busch led for a race-high 256 laps with the next highest number of laps led by a driver being Jimmie Johnson with 36 laps led.
“This has been a dream come true to be able to wrap up this special weekend,” Busch said. “This was a fantastic job by my guys to keep us up front all day. This was a race for the ages. To have a car as good as it was in the daytime, I was afraid of what it would do at night. It’s unbelievable that we swept both races.”
“It’s a prestigious race, it’s a tough race, and most important, it’s a team race.”
For a while, it looked like Kyle Busch might score another comeback win. Busch came from almost three laps down in Saturday’s Nationwide Series to get his fifth win in six tries at Charlotte. Sunday night, it looked like he might do it again. While leading, Busch got tangled up with Brad Keselowski on lap 168 after a two-tire stop and seriously damaged his No. 18 M&M’s Toyota. Busch meticulously made his way through the field though and worked his way up to a third-place finish to move within 29 points of series leader Kevin Harvick.
“We had a really good race car, I thought we were one of the best to be able to keep up with the two and the one,” Busch said. “We made a lot of changes to it (the car), we kept making swings at it to try and make it better, and we got a third place finish out of it.”
Jeff Burton was among the late race challengers, but on a late restart, it looked as if Kyle Busch got into Burton’s left rear tire in a three-wide situation. Burton proceeded to cut the tire down and finish 25th.
One of the evolving stories of the night was the run of Jamie McMurray and the No. 1 Bass Pro Shops Chevrolet. Earlier in the day, Dario Franchitti won the Indianapolis 500 to make Chip Ganassi the first car owner to win both the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500 in the same year. And with McMurray making a run to the top at Charlotte, it looked as if Ganassi might win the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 in the same day, an unprecedented accomplishment in auto racing. McMurray finished second behind Busch and moved up two spots to 15th in the points standings.
“We had a great car, you know I was worried after happy hour. Our car had really good speed but it just didn’t drive very well,” McMurray said. “We did a great job of making adjustments though and put the same setup we ran in the All-Star Race. The car was really good and they did a nice job of adjusting on it all night long.”
Starting the race fourth in points, Johnson looked poised for another win at Charlotte early in the race but tagged the outside retaining wall on the front stretch just under 100 laps into the race. Johnson rebounded back into the top 20, but got loose on the back stretch on lap 274 and slammed into the wall, effectively ending his night.
“I was trying to run from the leader, and I had the leader on my tail coming through,” Johnson said. “We made some big adjustments to the car and basically adjusted it to free it up there and I just spun out off of (Turn 2).”
Point leader Harvick picked up an 11th-place finish to retain a slight points lead over Kyle Busch. Other points movers were Jeff Gordon, who moved up two spots to fourth after a sixth place finish while Busch moved up three spots with the win to sixth.
The Sprint Cup Series heads to Pocono Raceway next week for the Gillette Fusion ProGlide 500 presented by Target.
Photo courtesy of Wilson Herlong
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