Kenseth grabs victory
JOLIET, Ill. — Matt Kenseth pulled away from teammate Kyle Busch to win the opening race in the Chase for Sprint Cup championship.
The steely win by the top seed in the Chase helped restore a sense of normalcy at the end of a week that saw NASCAR fighting the biggest credibility crisis in its history.
Now the sport waits to see if its fans are still angry that several teams manipulated the race finish at Richmond. The ensuing scandal has raised questions about NASCAR’s integrity that winning team owner Joe Gibbs said he’s seen before in sports.
“I’ve seen things like that happen on the NFL side,” said Gibbs, a three-time Super Bowl winning coach with the Washington Redskins. “We tried to do the best we could in handling it, and hopefully we’ve got this behind us with the race. We all love our sport and nobody wants anything that would hurt or harm it or disappoint people.”
Kenseth slid into Chicago under the radar as all the attention centered squarely on NASCAR’s investigation into the schemes of at least three teams to alter the outcome of the previous week.
It led to severe sanctions against Michael Waltrip Racing, and Martin Truex Jr. was replaced by Ryan Newman in the Chase field. NASCAR continued to review incidents long after cars began to practice for Sunday’s race. Chairman Brian France took the unprecedented step of expanding the field to 13 drivers to add Jeff Gordon.
Then France held an ethics meeting for teams on the eve of the opening race to outline new “rules of the road,” demanding drivers give 100 percent going forward and banning any attempts to artificially affect the outcome of races.
Kenseth said he was eager to help NASCAR move on.
“I think the important thing is it’s behind us,” Kenseth said. “I think it’s pretty clear what everybody expects and the things we should do or not do, though a lot of that is pretty obvious, anyway. Hopefully we can move on because I think it’s been a tough week — not only for some of the teams involved, but I think it’s also been a tough week for NASCAR.”
A strong opener to the 10-race Chase would have gone a long way, but rain made it a difficult day.
The start was delayed by mist for almost 90 minutes. Once the race did go off, it made it almost to the halfway point before the sky opened up again. In all, there were two stoppages totaling 6 hours, 30 minutes and Kenseth didn’t cross the finish line until early Monday morning.
It was worth the wait when he passed Busch on a restart with 27 laps remaining — in part because of a push from Kevin Harvick — then led Busch across the finish line for a 1-2 finish for Joe Gibbs Racing and Toyota.
He’ll take an eight-point lead over Busch into next week’s race at New Hampshire.
That’s bad news for the rest of the Chase field: JGR drivers have won six of the seven races so far this season on 1.5-mile tracks, and four of the nine remaining races in the Chase are tracks covering the same distance.
Kenseth, a six-time winner this season, has four wins on 1.5-mile tracks.
“We’re excited about that,” crew chief Jason Ratcliff said. “I think our program has been pretty solid all the way around.”
This latest victory denied Busch a weekend sweep yet again. He’d won the Truck and Nationwide Series races this weekend, only to come up short in the main event. The same thing happened last month at Bristol, where Busch won the first two legs of the trifecta only to be denied the sweep by Kenseth.
