Rewinding Sunday’s rain-delayed Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond

The winless streak stood at 35 races.

But the trip back to Victory Lane for Kurt Busch was much, much, longer.

Busch dominated Sunday’s rain-delayed Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond International Raceway nearly from start to finish and held off Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Kevin Harvick to earn his first Sprint Cup Series win of the season.

Busch, who began the season under an indefinite suspension by NASCAR, has now raced and won his way into this season’s championship Chase.

Jimmie Johnson finished third, Jamie McMurray was fourth and Joey Logano was fifth.

Turning point

Busch’s biggest danger came on Lap 270 when Brett Moffitt’s spin brought out a caution in the middle of green-flag pit stops. That left three cars on the lead lap, but Busch was one of them. He was able to restart the race on Lap 279 with many of his toughest competition mired back in the field.

Three who mattered

Kurt Busch: Winning cures everything, the saying goes. It certainly seems to have have done that for Busch.

Jamie McMurray: Every week, McMurray seems closer and closer to making the turn into Victory Lane. For much of the race, he was Busch’s top contender for the win.

Chase Elliott: Elliott’s second career Cup series start was filled with much less drama than his debut last month at Martinsville, Va. Elliott remained on the lead lap the entire race and finished 16th.

Observations

▪  Once again, Hendrick Motorsports-powered cars filled the top-10 and one of the seven wound up in Victory Lane. Right now, it seems if you don’t have a Hendrick powerplant, you’re going to have a tougher road than most to get to the front and stay there.

▪  Roush Fenway Racing’s struggles continued at Richmond. All three of its drivers finished at least two laps down in Sunday’s race. Greg Biffle was 21st, Trevor Bayne was 24th and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was 28th. Stenhouse, who finished fourth last week at Bristol, Tenn., warned Richmond would be much more difficult because it had less banking.

▪  As of Sunday afternoon, one of three pit crew members injured in a pit road fire during Friday night’s Xfinity Series race at Richmond remained hospitalized. Anthony O’Brien, a crew member for Richard Childress Racing’s No. 62 team driven by Brendan Gaughan, continues to be treated at a local hospital. RCR’s Josh Wittman and Clifford Turner from JGL Racing were both released Saturday.

They said it

“It’s an incredible feeling. It’s a total team effort. And the way that everything came together just seemed like we were building and building and building towards a great finish like this.” – race winner, Kurt Busch

Notes

Bowyer grabs second top-10: Clint Bowyer began the 2015 season with a seventh-place finish at Daytona. It has been a struggle since.

Sunday, however, Bowyer ran consistently strong the whole race and ended up ninth for his second Top-10 finish of the season. He improved three spots to 14th in the series standings.

“It was okay. We clearly need to be better,” he said. “After the start of the season we’ve had, it’s starting to feel like a little bit of momentum, and we’ve just got to keep digging.”

Difference between night and day: Three of Joe Gibbs Racing’s four teams took a vastly different turn in performance on Sunday from the rest of the weekend.

Matt Kenseth finished seventh, but Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin and David Ragan all saw their performance drop off from practice and qualifying on Friday and Sunday’s rain-delayed race. Edwards finished 19th, Hamlin 22nd and Ragan 23rd.

“Yeah, we were pretty happy with our (car) two days ago- not so much today,” said Hamlin’s crew chief, Dave Rogers. “Just we missed it. Made a few adjustments this morning or yesterday morning and obviously went the wrong way.”

N@SCAR

Three tweets from Sunday’s race:

This story was originally published April 26, 2015 at 4:40 PM with the headline "Rewinding Sunday’s rain-delayed Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond."