Image by fdtate via FlickrGreg Biffle cruised to victory and Jimmie Johnson took over the Chase points lead in Sunday's Price Chopper 400 at Kansas Speedway.
Biffle ran in the top 10 most of the day, but fought an ill-handling car. After the team made some adjustments, he took off and finally grabbed the lead on Lap 188 (of 267). That didn't last long; Jamie McMurray and Paul Menard opted for two tires on a yellow-flag stop and came out first and second. Menard got past McMurray and soon had Biffle on his tail. Biffle blew past Menard on the backstretch on Lap 207 (of 267). He briefly relinquished the lead about 30 laps later to make a green-flag pit stop, but was back in front after the field cycled through stops and held it over the final 29 laps.
It was the Biff's 16th career win and his second of the season. He joins Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart as the only two-time Cup winners at Kansas Speedway. Biffle also
picked up a $100,000 bonus from Ford Racing boss Jamie Allison. On Saturday, Allison promised to pay the bonus to any Ford Chase driver -- Biffle, Carl Edwards, or Matt Kenseth -- who won one of the final eight races of the season.
Stewart, who was 162 points out of first coming into this race, declared Saturday, "I have dug myself a pretty big hole" and said he was in
"go-for-broke" mode. He was behind Biffle in second in the closing laps, but first Johnson, then Kevin Harvick battled their way past him. While all that was going on, Biffle just extended his lead and beat Johnson to the finish line by 7.638 seconds.
The top seven finishers were all Chase drivers. Harvick finished third, followed by Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth. The other Chasers fought ill-handling cars and did not fare as well. Denny Hamlin finished 12th. Kurt Busch was 13th, Clint Bowyer 15th and Jeff Burton 18th. (
Race results)
Kyle Busch finished 21st, worst of all the Chasers, after two on-track incidents with David Reutimann. On Lap 52, Busch was running behind Reutimann coming out of Turn Two. It looked like Reutimann got loose and lifted off the gas, and Busch got into his rear, spinning him into the wall. On Lap 155, with Busch running in the top 10 and Reutimann several laps down, Reutimann pulled alongside Busch and slammed him up against the same wall. Reutimann spun again from the contact, but did considerable damage to Busch's car. Busch and crew chief Dave Rogers finally decided against taking the car to the garage, and just nursed it along the rest of the way to get what they could.
The first incident appeared accidental, though Busch might have just gotten impatient and decided to move Reutimann out of the way. The second incident was clearly intentional. It seems like there was already
some bad blood between the two drivers. After the Bristol night race in August, where the pair finished 1-2 with Busch winning, Busch said,
Reutimann was fast, and he was good, and I’m not going to say why I beat him because then he’ll fix it, but it has to do with behind the wheel...He wasn’t driving the place right. I’m sorry. If he fixes how to drive this place, he’d be right there with me.
Reutimann took exception on a radio show later that week, saying it was "the stupidest comment I've ever heard anybody say."
“I don’t know if [it was] the fact that his Superman cape was flying out the back when I was behind him and I couldn’t see or what the deal was. We got beat fair and square. That’s what it comes down to. We just got outrun. Professor Busch, maybe he can start a driving school at Bristol and the rest of the field can join in and go and [he can] show all of us what we’re doing wrong. I need help.”
Reutimann also hinted that he and Busch had had run-ins before.
“It all comes down to the fact that we just don’t like each other very much,” Reutimann said on the show. “It has been a while. We just don’t like each other, and we agree we don’t like each other and we’re both fine with it.”
In any case, on a day when most of the other Chase drivers were finishing high up on the leaderboard, the second incident took Busch out of contention and put a serious damper on his title hopes.
Wrestler Ric Flair was always fond of saying, "To be the man, you've got to beat the man," and Jimmie Johnson's No. 48 team showed why they're the men to beat Sunday. The four-time champ was running 21st at the mid-point of the race, but the team kept working to make the car better and Johnson kept running them down for his second-place finish.
“Honestly, I drove 400 miles with my tongue hanging out – just sawing at the wheel trying to get everything I could. Very pleased to have walked that fine line and didn’t make any mistakes. My crew did the same. [Crew chief] Chad [Knaus] called a great race. We
needed all those things to work together in order to get a good finish
and we did that.”
Johnson's efforts were good enough to put him in first in the
points standings, just eight points ahead of Hamlin, who slipped to second. The standings are a lot tighter after this race with nine drivers within 101 points of the lead. Harvick (-30) and Edwards (-53) jumped two spots to third and fourth respectively. Gordon (-58) jumped three spots to fifth. Kurt Busch (-70) dropped two spots to sixth. Brother Kyle (-80) dropped four spots to seventh. With the win, Biffle moved up one spot in the standings to eighth, but more importantly knocked 55 points off his deficit; he's now 85 points behind Johnson. Burton (-101), Stewart (-127), Kenseth (-149) and Bowyer (-252) round out the Chase field.
Image via Wikipedia
