In a near-carbon copy of what occurred last month at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, pole sitter Matt Kenseth managed to hold off Kasey Kahne in the final laps to win the STP 400 at Kansas Speedway this afternoon.
Like in Vegas, Kahne steadily cut into Kenseth’s edge but ran out of time, with the latter notching his second victory of the season. Kenseth also made a bit of NASCAR history with his Kansas win, as three straight Sprint Cup events have been won from the pole — a feat that hadn’t been accomplished since 1985, when Bill Elliott won at Michigan International Speedway, Dale Earnhardt won at Bristol Motor Speedway, and Elliott won again at Darlington Raceway.
For Kenseth, clean air made all the difference for himself and his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota.
“We made some small adjustments I believe, but it was kind of like musical chairs — you had to be out front when the music stopped and I knew if we could be somewhere towards the front when you had that last caution and that last pit stop, then we’d have a shot at it,” Kenseth said.
“…Our car was really fast in clean air — it was reasonable in dirty air, but it wasn’t quite good enough to catch all them guys and pass them. Thankfully, we had a couple really crazy good restarts for some reason and made up some ground and that got us back in position.”
Kahne charged from 27th at the start to earn his fourth Top-5 finish of 2013.
“We tightened up a little bit on that final run and putting two [tires] on, and zero, I knew we were going to be a little loose, but didn’t think it would be quite that bad,” he said. “Matt was fast and I just did everything I could, and he would go to those spots and I couldn’t make any ground.”
Jimmie Johnson passed Martin Truex Jr. for third late in the race, and managed to stretch his lead in the Cup championship to 37 points with his result. Clint Bowyer was unable to deliver a win for his fellow Kansans, but managed to come away with a nice fifth-place finish. Defending series champion Brad Keselowski took heavy damage to the rear end of his car and had its rear bumper cover fly off during the race, but was still able to finish sixth.
