The 2003 series champion needed only four laps in three rounds of qualifying Friday, outrunning final-round qualifiers like Joey Logano, who was fastest in each of the first two rounds, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., who made it to the final round, but will start 12th.

”I don’t get a lot of poles so any time I get a pole, it’s pretty special,” Kenseth said.

The pole was just the 19th for Kenseth, who will make his 623rd career start this weekend, and his second at Richmond. He and teammates Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch and rookie Daniel Suarez will be trying to give Joe Gibbs Racing its first victory of the season at a track where they have been dominant in recent years. Gibbs cars have won the last three races on the 0.75-mile oval.

Kenseth has won twice at Richmond, the last in the fall race in 2015.

Hamlin, who grew up about 20 miles from the track, will start 28th while Busch will start seventh and Suarez 11th.

Ryan Blaney, driving for the Wood Brothers, will start second, followed by Martin Truex Jr., Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Logano.

”It’s so frustrating when you win the first two rounds and the one that pays the money you are not there,” Logano said.

For Blaney, it will mark the third time he starts on the front row this season, again leaving him one spot shy of qualifying for the Clash at Daytona, the season-opening exhibition race before the Daytona 500. Pole winners from the previous year are guaranteed a spot, along with selected others.

”I really want to race in the Clash at Dayton, so these seconds are really hurting,” Blaney said. ”That race to me is like the coolest one, so I want to try to get a pole to race that.”

His team almost got him that spot, but Kenseth’s speed was 121.076 mph, and Blaney came in at 120.854 after running five total laps.

”It was a good effort,” he said. ”I didn’t think we were very good in Round 1. … We got better for Round 2 and better for Round 3.”

Kevin Harvick, the only driver with multiple poles this year, will start sixth.

—

More AP racing: http://racing.ap.org

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Former teammates Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano exchanged words after the race — in person and on Twitter — because Hamlin spun Logano as Logano was racing for the lead.

A flat tire knocked Jeff Gordon and Matt Kenseth out of the race while they were running 1-2.

Typical Bristol, right?

It looked that way as Kahne and Keselowski staged a spectacular battle for the lead, only for a caution to put them side-by-side for a restart with 39 laps to go.

Keselowski had an issue, he either spun his tires or the Hamlin-Logano feud disrupted his start, and Kahne sailed away for his first career victory at Bristol.

“Feels really good to win at this place,” Kahne said. “Such a tough track over the years. This is a big race for me. When you race in the Sprint Cup Series, Bristol is a race you want to win.”

Tempers flared after the race when Logano leaned inside Hamlin’s window to complain about Hamlin spinning him as he tried to pass Gordon for the lead.

Logano was pulled away from Hamlin’s car by crew members for both drivers in a classic post-Bristol clash that delighted the crowd. “They’re fighting! It’s Bristol!” yelled Clint Bowyer, who saw the action on the infield big screen.

Logano wouldn’t discuss what he told Hamlin, but indicated there’s no love lost between the former Joe Gibbs Racing teammates.

“That’s a freaking genius behind the wheel of the 11 car — probably the worst teammate I’ve ever had,” Logano said. “I have a scorecard and I’m not putting up with that. What goes around, comes around. I had to put up with him for years, so whatever.”

Hamlin shrugged it all off.

“He said he was coming for me,” Hamlin said. “I usually don’t see him, so it’s usually not a factor.”

The two sparred briefly on Twitter after the season-opening Daytona 500, when Hamlin complained Logano ruined the closing laps of the race. But he said Sunday’s flap was not a carryover.

“It didn’t have anything to do with that,” Hamlin said. “You’ve really got to control your car and he slipped up into me. Really, he would have been in the garage with no radiator in it if I had not checked up twice. I meant to run in to him. I didn’t mean to spin him out, but his day was fine. We finished bad and he finished bad. It’s even.”

But they continued sniping at each other after the race on Twitter, overshadowing what was undoubtedly the best race to date for NASCAR’s new Gen-6 race car.

And, their feuding may have played a role in the outcome of the race, too.

Keselowski was the leader on the final restart as he lined up next to Kahne. Hamlin was lined up behind Keselowski, with Logano lined up behind Hamlin. When the flag waved, Keselowski didn’t go and Kahne rocketed to the lead and never looked back.

Although it appeared Keselowski spun his tires, he was adamant after the race about what happened — “I got ran over!” — and that prevented him from breaking away on the restart.

Hamlin backed up Keselowski’s account.

“The 22 (Logano) ran into me and shoved me into (Keselowski),” Hamlin said. “Sorry to the 2, but I was the pinball in the sandwich. Once he throttled up, the 22 lifted me up and just flat out pinned me up against the 2.”

Logano seemed to think Keselowski spun his tires and that created the bottleneck, but Keselowski believed he had help from behind.

“I haven’t seen the replay, I just know my rear tires were off the ground before I got to the restart zone,” he said. “Eventually I got hit so hard it pushed my foot in the gas pedal, made myself look like a (fool). That was the deal. Never had another chance.”

Nobody came close to Kahne, who drove his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet to the win by 1.7-seconds. Hendrick drivers have now won two of the first four races this season.

Kyle Busch snagged second from Keselowski, who took over the Sprint Cup Series points lead as the only driver to open the season with four top-five finishes. Kurt Busch finished fourth and was followed by Bowyer and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Ryan Newman was seventh, Brian Vickers was eighth and Paul Menard and Jamie McMurray rounded out the top 10.

The race changed dramatically with 110 laps to go in a bizarre crash between leaders Gordon and Matt Kenseth. Gordon was out front when he suddenly lost a tire and his car darted up the track into the wall.

Kenseth had nowhere to go to avoid him and drove directly into the back of Gordon, causing heavy damage to both cars.

“You all right?” crew chief Alan Gustafson radioed Gordon.

“Yeah, I’m OK. Did we take out Matt, too?” Gordon asked.

With the top two cars in the garage, the rest of the field headed to pit road to reset for the final 100 laps.

“I hate that for Matt Kenseth,” Gordon said. “He was coming, and it was just a matter of time before he caught us. We needed points. This definitely isn’t going to get us many.”

Kenseth, winner of last week’s race at Las Vegas, said the crash was unavoidable.

“There’s not a lot either one of us can do about that,” he said. “There was nowhere to go.”

Before the Gordon-Kenseth crash, Gordon and Logano were dueling for the lead. Gordon used a two-tire stop with about 175 laps to go to gain eight spots on pit road and take the lead. Logano chased Gordon around the 0.533-mile bullring, pulling even with the four-time champion as he exited the corners only to lose ground on the straights.

Lurking behind in third was Hamlin, who apparently got tired of waiting for Logano to get past Gordon and showed how restless he was with slight contact on Logano’s bumper as they exited Turn 2.

The tap caused Logano to back his car into the wall and took him out of contention, leading to the post-race drama Bristol is known to create.

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Kenseth knows a bit about risk after his offseason move to Joe Gibbs Racing, and this latest gamble paid off with his third victory in Vegas.

Kenseth won on his 41st birthday in just his third start for his new team, barely holding off Kasey Kahne at Las Vegas Motor Speedway for his 25th career victory Sunday.

“I was real nervous all day,” Kenseth said. “(Kahne) had the best car. I told (crew chief) Jason (Ratcliff) with about 12 to go that I was sorry we were going to lose. We were just too tight. … We didn’t have the fastest car there, but we had it where we needed it to be.”

Kenseth took charge by taking only fuel on the final pit stop during caution while almost everybody else replaced two tires. He took the lead and held onto it, using his veteran savvy — and a few screamed instructions at his new spotter — to keep Kahne’s impressive Chevrolet behind him to the finish.

The frequently laid-back Kenseth celebrated with uncommon vigor after his JGR Toyota crossed the line. He’s still getting comfortable with his new teammates after leaving Roush Fenway Racing in the highest-profile driver move of the offseason, joining Gibbs after 13 seasons with RFR.

“I’m not a huge goal person, but my goal was to win, and to win early,” Kenseth said. “Nobody has put any pressure on me except for myself, but I also know that Coach hired me to come in there, climb in that car and win races. You certainly want to do that, and you don’t want to disappoint people. I’m glad we got a win, but it’s still only Week 3. I feel like this is the beginning.”

Pole-sitter Brad Keselowski finished third, with Kenseth’s teammate, Kyle Busch, in fourth and Carl Edwards fifth. Jimmie Johnson, the overall points leader, was sixth and Dale Earnhardt Jr. seventh.

Defending Vegas champion Tony Stewart finished 11th, while Gibbs driver Denny Hamlin was 15th after an eventful week featuring a $25,000 fine from NASCAR for criticizing the new Gen-6 race car.

The win was the 50th for Toyota in Sprint Cup Series competition. Kenseth is just the third NASCAR driver to win on his birthday, joining Cale Yarborough — who did it twice — and Busch.

“I showed them a fake ID when they hired me,” Kenseth said with a laugh. “Told them I was 28, going to be 29 this year.”

Kenseth has won at least one race in 11 of his 14 full seasons in the Sprint Cup series, but the first 13 were all in Fords with Roush Fenway, the team that gave him his break in NASCAR and fostered his development into a likely Hall of Famer. Kenseth’s decision to leave for a seat on Gibbs’ team was an open secret for much of last season, although the veteran star never really explained his move.

“I had a lot of confidence after our first meeting and decided to go do this, and just had a great feeling about it, and still do,” Kenseth said.

Gibbs had his own worries before the race after a rough start to the season for Toyota. Kenseth and Busch both had serious engine trouble at Daytona two weeks ago.

“Lots of times, a victory, the thrill of it, depends on kind of what happens leading up to it,” Gibbs said. “We’ve had a tough couple of weeks, as everybody knows. … In tough times, everybody bands together around our place. We started fighting, and we worked our way out of some tough things.”

The 400-mile race was the first real test for NASCAR’s new Gen-6 car on the intermediate tracks they’re built to race. Although Hamlin commanded the week’s headlines with his pessimism amplified by the NASCAR fine, most drivers were curious how the Gen-6 would work in its ideal 1.5-mile environment.

Any drivers who still think it’s too tough to pass in the new car must not have been watching Busch, who made two lengthy charges up to early leads, doing it both before and after a pit-row speeding penalty dropped him back to 18th.

“I just hate it for my team,” said Busch, a Las Vegas native and graduate of nearby Durango High School. “We had by far the best car in practice. I don’t know where that went. Today was a different day. The worst Gibbs car ended up winning the race. It’s funny how this game works.”

Busch, who finished second in Saturday’s Nationwide Series race, charged through the field with impressive ease and took the lead out of a restart with a daredevil move on the apron with 102 laps to go. He went three wide and got underneath Kahne while kicking up dust well below the white line.

Kahne set the qualifying speed record on the Vegas track last year, but rain wiped out qualifying this week. He reclaimed the lead and held it until Kenseth nosed ahead out of another restart with 36 laps left when Kahne had trouble getting out of pit row, nearly hitting Stewart.

“I had an unbelievable car throughout the whole race,” Kahne said. “We just came out, I think, sixth (out of the pit). Tough to say we would have got by him anyway.

“I had a great day. I drove so hard every single lap today, and that’s just the new Gen-6 car. It was a lot of fun. I love it.”

The Gen-6 is still a work in progress, however. Several drivers reported various problems with their cars early on, with Clint Bowyer and Stewart both dropping far back in the opening laps. After three days of chilly weather in the desert, warmer temperatures Sunday changed the track’s feel, and teams struggled to adjust to the slickness.

Danica Patrick, the pole winner two weeks ago at Daytona, struggled with her car from the start, going two laps down by the 60th lap and later getting penalized for a tire violation. She finished 33rd.

The post Matt Kenseth wins at Las Vegas appeared first on IdealCapper.

“Nobody in the whole field had any clue what was going to happen,” he said, “so we felt like we had a good chance.”

Harvick dominated Saturday night’s exhibition Sprint Unlimited, winning the kickoff to Speedweeks at Daytona International Speedway for the third time in five years. Harvick ties Tony Stewart and Dale Jarrett as three-time winners of the event, while the late Dale Earnhardt holds the record with six wins.

But no one has a firm grasp on what the season-opening Daytona 500 will look like in NASCAR’s brand new car. The non-points race only had 19 cars at the start, and the field was whittled down to 12 after an early accident.

The Daytona 500 will start with a full 43-car field in much warmer conditions.

“It’s going to be a pack, absolutely,” Harvick said. “I don’t think there’s going to be too many chances. You’ll see some cars break away. I think if you turn on a 2000 race, one of those races, it’s going to be very similar.”

Second-place finisher Greg Biffle agreed the Daytona 500 should have a throwback feel.

“I heard some guys talk about old-school racing, and it is a little bit like that,” he said. “The thing about it is that when you get 43 cars out there, it is going to be a ton different. Then the bottom lane is going to work. There will be a middle. With more cars out there I think it will be better.”

Fans hope so after Saturday night, which was somewhat uneventful because of a nine-car accident just 15 laps into the race. It turned the final two segments into something resembling a parade until a late push to catch Harvick.

Harvick threw a block on Biffle and Stewart, Joey Logano couldn’t get to the leaders and Matt Kenseth, who might have had the strongest car, faded late as Harvick rolled to the win. He led 40 of the 75 laps.

“I’m glad we got Speedweeks started off the right way,” he said.

The race was split into three segments and fans got to vote on the format. The result was 30 laps, 25 laps and then a 20-lap sprint to the finish.

But several big names were knocked out a mere 15 laps into the race. Stewart was running second when he cut across the front of Marcos Ambrose, making slight contact that turned Stewart sideways and required a save to keep from crashing. Traffic stacked up behind him, triggering a chain-reaction, nine-car crash that wiped out seven cars.

Taken out were defending race winner Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin from Joe Gibbs Racing, Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson from Hendrick Motorsports, Mark Martin and Kurt Busch.

“I didn’t see much. I was just cruising along and I saw sparks in front of me — I knew that wasn’t good,” Johnson said.

It was a costly crash for Kurt Busch, who also wrecked in practice Friday and has two damaged race cars just two days into Speedweeks. His Furniture Row Racing team was getting assistance from Richard Childress Racing on car repairs to ensure Busch has enough in the fleet to get to the Daytona 500.

“We’re going to help them in any way we can,” Childress said. “We’ll probably have one of those cars back (Sunday), repaired. We got two or three more back at the shop.”

Stewart, who took responsibility for triggering the crash, went on to “win” the first segment.

“I made a move for the lead and probably was a little anxious too early,” Stewart said of his first segment gaffe.

Fans then voted for the drivers to make a four-tire change during a pit stop between the first and second segment, and it was largely Harvick’s race from there. He dominated the final two segments, and held off challenges from Stewart and Biffle on the final lap to win in his Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet.

It’s a strong opener to what’s going to be Harvick’s final year with RCR. He’s already signed on to drive for Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014.

“It’s about winning races,” Harvick said. “The politics and everything are one thing, but when we get to the race track it’s about sitting in this race car making it as fast as it will go. And those (RCR) guys, they don’t care about anything but winning and wanting to do good, so we owe it to them and everybody at (sponsor) Budweiser.”

Budweiser was the longtime sponsor of the race, which was called the Budweiser Shootout until series sponsor Sprint took over the rights this year.

Harvick broke his engine trying to do a celebratory burnout, and his car had to be pushed to Victory Lane.

Biffle finished second and Logano was third in his Penske Racing debut. Stewart was fourth and Kenseth fifth in his Joe Gibbs Racing debut.

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