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.

“That’s a pretty good one for me to win,” he thought to himself. “Already got my name on the trophy.”

Hornish survived two restarts in the final 15 laps and held off Kyle Busch to win the Nationwide Series race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Hornish led 114 laps in his second career Nationwide victory, but needed a strong finish to outrun Busch, the hometown driver who won the Nationwide race last week in Phoenix.

Hornish credited the win to his dominant car, all the more impressive since the drivers got almost no practice on the 1.5-mile tri-oval due to Friday’s rain.

“You dream about having cars like this,” Hornish said. “I think I used more energy celebrating than I did actually driving the car today.”

Hornish and Busch both went aggressively after the final restart with seven laps to go, with Busch briefly nudging ahead before Hornish reclaimed the lead with five laps left. Hornish got clear of Busch and finished comfortably in a caution-filled race.

With his third top-10 finish in three races this season, Hornish moved atop the points race and gave owner Roger Penske his first victory at Las Vegas in any NASCAR series — and Penske’s first win since moving from Dodge to Ford in the offseason.

Hornish also snapped a 36-race winless streak in his Ford in his 69th Nationwide race overall.

Hornish hadn’t won since November 2011 at Phoenix. His crew chief, Greg Erwin, won his first Nationwide race.

Busch dominated last week’s race, but his Toyota couldn’t catch up to Hornish despite plenty of cagey racing. Hornish had nearly a three-second lead over Busch before the first of the final two cautions.

“Sam was just that much faster than us,” said Busch, who finished in the top 10 for just the second time in 10 races in Las Vegas. “He was beating us a little bit everywhere, all the way around the race track. Certainly, when he stepped on the gas, that thing would go forward in a hurry. Us two were the class of the field, but he was the class of everybody.”

Pole sitter Brian Vickers finished third, with Trevor Bayne fourth — despite an early brush against the wall — and Elliott Sadler fifth. Travis Pastrana came in 10th, four spots ahead of Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Vickers echoed Busch’s praise of Hornish’s superior car.

“I couldn’t move around much,” said Vickers, a top-10 finisher three times in six Vegas races. “The car would get out from under me. Seemed like Sam could not only get through the bumps, but he could run top through bottom.

“We just ended up getting too loose. We killed the car on the last run. It was a valiant effort, trying to go for the win.”

Hornish regained his early lead on the 145th lap, but Scott Lagasse Jr.’s late spin and an even later wreck forced him to be resourceful out of restarts.

Shortly after Lagasse’s spin, rookie Kyle Larson’s car ended up in flames after a big collision with Joey Gase and Ryan Sieg. Larson, who also hit the wall on the 87th lap, emerged from his car unharmed.

Larson, a 20-year-old from the Sacramento area, survived a frightening crash on the final lap of the Nationwide race two weeks ago at Daytona, where his car sailed into the fence and peppered the crowd with debris, including a tire, injuring more than two dozen fans.

Hornish leads the Nationwide points standings by 19 points over Justin Allgaier.

The post Sam Hornish Jr. wins at Las Vegas appeared first on IdealCapper.

“Ultimately, I’m not OK with it,” Hamlin told ESPN “NASCAR Now” reporter Jamie Little and other media outlets during the Gen-6 test at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. “This is the most upset and angry I’ve been in a really, really long time about anything … anything that relates to NASCAR.

“The truth is what the truth is. I don’t believe in this. I’m never going to believe in it. As far as I’m concerned, I’m not going to pay the fine. If they suspend me, they suspend me. I don’t care at this point.”

According to the NASCAR rulebook, failure to pay a fine may result in suspension. The rulebook also says unpaid fines may be collected by deducting money earned from a race weekend.

Hamlin issued a statement on Twitter on Thursday night, saying he will appeal the fine.

“The short of the long of it is I believe I was severely disrespected by NASCAR by getting fined,” he tweeted. “I believe that the simple fact of us not even having a conversation about this issue before I was hit with a fine has something to say about our relationship. What I said was 1 sentence taken completely out of context. Most drivers will tell you that we constantly have our AND nascars best interest in mind when speaking.

“On the other hand I am a person that worked very hard from the BOTTOM to get where I am today and someone telling me that I can give my 100 percent honest opinion really bothers me. Since being fined in 2010 I have been a lot more careful about what I say to media and I felt this past weekend felt completely in my rights to give a assessment of the question asked. I feel as if today NASCAR lost one of its biggest supporters vocally of where our sport is headed.

“So in the end there are no winners. I said today I would not pay the fine. I stand by that and will go through the process of appealing. Trust me, this is not about the money.. It’s much deeper. I will now shift my focus on giving FedEx and my team what they deserve this weekend, a win.”

Hamlin tweeted earlier in the evening that the statement came with no assistance from his public relations department or that of Joe Gibbs Racing .

“We have spoken with NASCAR and will continue to keep an open dialogue with them on this matter, but we will keep those discussions between the parties involved,” Joe Gibbs Racing said in a statement released Friday. “We will fully support Denny in his appeal process.”

NASCAR announced the fine on Thursday, saying Hamlin’s comments violated Section 12-1 of the NASCAR rulebook that includes all actions detrimental to stock car racing.

Spokesman Kerry Tharp said the governing body draws the line on criticizing the new car that NASCAR has spent the past few months promoting.

“Following the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series event last Sunday at Phoenix International Raceway, Denny Hamlin made some disparaging remarks about the on-track racing that had taken place that afternoon,” NASCAR said in a statement. “While NASCAR gives its competitors ample leeway in voicing their opinions when it comes to a wide range of aspects about the sport, the sanctioning body will not tolerate publicly made comments by its drivers that denigrate the racing product.”

NASCAR vice president for competition Robin Pemberton said Hamlin can appeal the fine.

“It’s like every other appeal,” he said. “Over the course of time, you remember mechanics and crew chiefs, whatever, if they appeal, then they can continue to carry on business as usual until the appeal has been heard and ruled on.”

Pemberton said there was no warning given to drivers about criticizing the car during preseason competition meetings.

“Those were some of the conversations we may have had a few years ago,” he said. “But it’s more of a matter of fact that you can’t criticize your core product, what you’re trying to do.

“Constructive criticism is one thing, but there’s different statements that people made that are damaging. That’s where we won’t tolerate those types of things.”

Hamlin was critical of the Gen-6 car and single-file racing at Phoenix a week after fans complained about the single-file racing in the Daytona 500.

“I don’t want to be the pessimist, but it did not race as good as our Gen-5 cars,” Hamlin told reporters after the race won by Carl Edwards. “This is more like what the Generation 5 was at the beginning. The teams hadn’t figured out how to get the aero balance right.

“Right now, you just run single-file and you cannot get around the guy in front of you. You would have placed me in 20th place with 30 [laps] to go, I would have stayed there — I wouldn’t have moved up. It’s just one of those things where track position is everything.”

Pemberton, while not addressing the performance of the car of which Hamlin was critical, said NASCAR and Goodyear are looking at building tires that could improve performance.

“It comes in many different ways, shapes and forms,” he said. “It comes in tire sizes, tire widths, heights, staggers. It comes in whether the tire is a softer left and a harder right that may perform better or vice versa.

“As many of you know, Goodyear continues to test every year to try to improve tire wear or tire grip. So that is ongoing.”

This isn’t the first time Hamlin has been fined for voicing his opinion. He was docked $50,000 in 2010 for comments on phantom debris cautions made on Twitter following the Nationwide Series race at Chicagoland Speedway.

It is the second time a NASCAR driver has been penalized for comments this season. Nationwide Series driver Jeremy Clements was suspended indefinitely after the season opener at Daytona International Speedway for using a racial slur in the presence of an MTV reporter.

“I’ll be honest, I’m not going to say anything the rest of the year … as long as it relates to competition,” Hamlin said. “You can ask me how my daughter is, and talk to me after wins about what have you. But as long as it relates to competition, I’m out from here on out.

“The bad part is I feel I’ve been a pretty good spokesman for [NASCAR] in being positive when things aren’t always positive. They lost one small spokesman today, that’s all.”

Michael Waltrip Racing’s Clint Bowyer, who also drives a Toyota, said that what happened to Hamlin would not impact what he says in the future.

“You know, I’m going to shoot you straight,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re all in this together. You guys included. We’ve got to — this is an important time for us. We’ve got a great thing going with this Gen-6 car.

“Our manufacturers have spent millions of dollars on this race car and we’re all proud of it — NASCAR included. Anything is going to take time. Anytime you make something — completely start over from scratch — and do things to make your program better, your sport, or whatever you want to call it, it’s going to take time. It’s a work in progress. You’re not just going to start the very first race out with something new.”

Hamlin is fourth in points after his third-place finish at Phoenix. A suspension ultimately could lead to his missing the Chase for the first time in his Cup career.

“It’s an opinion,” Hamlin explained of what he said. “It’s not even a bad one. I have to be careful. I don’t want to make things worse than they already are. And this is something that was absolutely nothing, and it got blown into something.

“It’s just going to be worse for them. Let them deal with it.”

The post Denny Hamlin to appeal $25K fine appeared first on IdealCapper.