Who… should you be talking about after the race?
As the laps ticked down from 20 to 15 to 10 to go, Denny Hamlin was opening up a commanding lead in a fuel mileage race at Kansas Speedway. After some very good races at Kansas, it looked like the Advent Health 400 would limp to a less-than riveting finish. Then Kyle Busch went for a spin and suddenly, mileage was out the window and an overtime restart was in.
Hamlin left pit road with the lead, with Chris Buescher to his outside. Somewhere behind them, Kyle Larson and Martin Truex Jr., who had been strong all day, were lurking.
The green flag waved and Hamlin got swarmed on all sides. Buescher took a slim lead over Larson, but Larson didn’t give in, darting to the outside. Buescher could have pinched Larson into the wall but ran him clean. The pair touched in the final turn, Chase Elliott smelled the blood in the water and charged, but Buescher and Larson hung on coming to the line.
And for a few minutes, neither driver knew if he had won.
It was that close. The official photo shows Larson crossing the line to win by inches — the closest finish in NASCAR Cup Series History.
Yep. Larson and Buescher were closer than Jimmie Johnson and Clint Bowyer at Talladega or Ricky Craven and Kurt Busch at Darlington. The margin of victory? Just .001 seconds, officially.
It was close enough that Buescher’s team questioned the width of the start-finish line on the apron.
The official photo shows that Larson still had it, but let it sink in: It was so close that people were questioning an inch of paint on the pavement. This week, it’s impossible to talk about Larson without talking about Buescher, and they’ll be linked by that finish forever.
And don’t forget Michael McDowell. McDowell qualified eighth, and while he flew under the radar all day and didn’t score any stage points, he lurked close enough to the front to get a much needed 10th-place finish after a run of terrible luck.
What… is the big question leaving this race in the rearview?
Hamlin says it’s his year. So far, the numbers hint that it could be — with three wins, Hamlin…
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