Kyle Busch Clinches First Sprint Cup Championship in Ford EcoBoost 400

  A broken leg before the green flag even flew before the season would deter most away from thinking a championship within one’s hands.

  After breaking his leg in the Xfinity Series’ debut at Daytona, Kyle Busch missed 11 races but with a win in the Ford EcoBoost 400 clinched himself the Sprint Cup Series Championship.

  The race started out with pole sitter Denny Hamin immediately losing his advantage of being in the front of the pack because of an oil leak that let off a lot of smoke and dropped his speed significantly.

 Joey Logano capitalized on the former EcoBoost winner’s mistake and led the first 19 laps of the race. Logano lost the lead when the first caution of the race came out and Busch lead the race off pit road to get his first lead.

  On the restart Jeff Gordon had an impressive restart to gain his first lead which drew a thunderous applause from the sold out crowd.

  Gordon lost the lead 9 laps later to Kevin Harvick on the restart off a caution because of a Kasey Kahne crash in turn 1.

  After having an impressive run, Joey Logano took the lead from Harvick during green flag pit stops.

  Logano and Kyle Busch battled through green flag pit stops and a caution for debris on the backstretch.

  Another caution for fluid on the track on lap 168 allowed Keselowski to overtake Logano to continuously battle with Kyle Busch for the lead.  

  Harvick climbed back right behind Kyle in 3^rd while Keselowski got the lead again off of green flag pit stops with 47 laps to go in the race.

  41 laps later metal on the front stretch caused a caution with only 15 laps to go.

  Pit strategy immediately became the deciding factor for not only the race, but for the championship of the entire season.

  Keselowski won the race off the pits but Kyle knew what was at stake and took his opportunity to bounce. Kyle led every lap after the restart and secured himself his first Sprint Cup Series Championship.

  “This is just unbelievable, so amazing and means so much right here right now and probably will for a long, long time to come,” Busch said minutes after pulling into Championship stage. “The opportunity that the amount of people that have poured their life and soul into everything that Kyle Busch does and is about-from M&M’s to Toyota to Snickers and Twix and Skittles, Joe Gibbs and his family and all of Joe Gibbs Racing, everyone that gave me such a fast race car here tonight to drive. It was so much fun. This is just a dream come true and my family, my wife, my son – to have him this year and to have everything we’ve gone through this year to be in this moment – I don’t know what else to say, but this is so special.”  

  Defending Sprint Cup Champion Kevin Harvick finished the race second after “…, my car just doesn’t absolutely feel great at all,…”

  Martin Truex Jr. finished 11^th and was never in real contention for most of the night.

  “Yeah, obviously a little disappointed in the way we ran this weekend, just never could – really never cold quite hit on anything to get the car to do the things we needed it to.” Truex said. “Not from the lack of effort. The guys really put a lot of effort into bringing this car here and really throughout the weekend we tried a lot, and we worked really hard on it.”

  He finished 6^th in the race as he too was having trouble with handling his car.

  “You know, gosh, I’ll be honest you know, the competitor in me got a little bit – just so caught up in the moment of the race where we took the lead and I got really excited, and I thought, okay, we’ve got clean air, let’s see what we have, and I knew we needed a few adjustments.” Gordon said.” The track was really slick. I actually pulled away from him. I kind of got excited and got my hopes up there, but then Kevin started coming on pretty, strong, and then we had that restart, and you know, I knew when those guys got by me I just didn’t quite have what they had. I was just lacking a couple of little things.”

  Busch’s comeback story closed Ford Championship Weekend to what seemed like Jeff Gordon’s weekend. The unofficial face of NASCAR for the last decade announced that this season would be his last, which naturally drew a monumental amount of attention of media, fans and even former and current competitors. After being interviewed before the race, other Championship 4 member Kevin Harvick took a picture with Gordon’s car for the last time. The grandstands pulled two card stunts where one read “Thank you Jeff #24ever” as Gordon was pulling down the front stretch about to start his last race in his 93 win and 4 championship career.

  An overall wonderful way to send off champions former and now present, and also visiting race fans. Collective group saying thank you at once for wonderful memories they won’t soon forget.