Who … should you be talking about after the race?
Chase Elliott entered this weekend as the Cup Series point leader, but there were many questions surrounding him at the start of the season; he had just one top-five finish in the first 10 races of 2022, he hadn’t won on an oval since winning the championship at Phoenix Raceway in 2020, and he was on a 26-race winless streak, the longest of his career.
He put all of those questions to bed and then some on Monday afternoon (May 2).
Elliott took the lead from Ross Chastain on the final restart with 53 laps to go, and he cruised to the win after running in the top five for the majority of the day. And, with Ryan Blaney finishing 26th, Elliott now has a 50-point lead in the regular season championship heading into next weekend’s event at Darlington Raceway.
It’s been a feast or famine season for Joe Gibbs Racing in the Cup Series, but all of their cars showed up to play at Dover. Christopher Bell came back from a loose wheel to finish fourth, and Martin Truex Jr. was on pace to finish either third or fourth until a last-lap collision with Chastain left him with a 12th-place finish.
With 100 laps to go, it seemed to be shaping up to be Kyle Busch’s day ¯ and on his birthday, just like last year at Kansas Speedway. He led the most laps of any driver in the race (103), also marking the first time since the 2020 Bristol Night Race that he’s led triple digits in a Cup race.
Busch dominated stage 2 and the beginning of the final stage, but when he went to pit under green for the final time, a caution for AJ Allmendinger’s runaway wheel left Busch and second-place Alex Bowman trapped one lap down; Busch could only muster a seventh-place finish by the time the checkered flag flew.
Denny Hamlin’s miserable 2022 season continues, as his lone top-10 finish in 11 races this year remains his win at Richmond Raceway in April. But unlike most of Hamlin’s poor finishes this year, he was one of the fastest cars…
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