Kyle Busch celebrates a win at Gateway (photo from NASCAR Media).
It was another Nationwide Series race and another win for Kyle Busch in the Missouri-Illinois Dodge Dealers 250 Saturday night at Gateway International Raceway. The victory was Busch’s sixth of the season but his first in three tries at Gateway.
“They (the No. 18 Joe Gibbs racing team) gave me a great racecar,” Busch said. “We didn’t qualify as well as we wanted to, maybe because of the draw, maybe because of the setup in qualifying trim, but we were steady all night.”
Reed Sorenson, who has visited the Gateway victory lane in the past, finished second.
With the win, Busch extended an already fairly comfortable points lead over second-place Carl Edwards to 212 points.
Edwards finished the race third.
In the last seven races, Busch has either won or finished seconds. In those starts, he has three wins and four runner-up showings.
The win was the 27th for Busch in his Nationwide career, tying with Jeff Burton for fourth all-time.
Harvick had a pretty sizeable lead in the late stages of the event, but he tried to play out the fuel mileage game and lost, running out with about thirty laps to go and handing the lead over to Busch.
Instead of a win, Harvick ended up with a 17th-place finish.
Prior to running out of fuel, he had, by far, the most dominant car of the night, leading 106 laps.
“It was good, hard-fought race,” Busch said. “It was a real battle there with Kevin Harvick. He had a real good car tonight. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to race him there at the end. He ran out and had to come to pit road.”
Mike Bliss finished fourth, and pole-sitter Brad Keselowski rounded out the top-five and held on to his position of third in the championship points standings.
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