Kyle Busch Claims the Inaugural Win at Kentucky

[media-credit name=”Joe Dunn ” align=”alignright” width=”269″][/media-credit]With his second win of the weekend, Kyle Busch took the honors for the Inaugural Quaker State 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Kentucky Speedway. The win marks his 22nd Cup series win and his third of 2011, pushing him into the points lead.
David Reutimann finished second, his second top ten for the season. Jimmie Johnson was third, followed by Ryan Newman and Carl Edwards fifth. Matt Kenseth finished sixth followed by Brad Keselowski, David Ragan, Kurt Busch and Jeff Gordon rounding out the top 10.
Busch leads the most laps, leading 7 times for 125 laps. There were 12 leaders, including Brad Keselowski for 79 laps, Kurt Busch for 41, Reutimann for 7 and Hamlin for 5. The race had 6 cautions for 32 laps.
Comments following the race, from the top three:
KYLE BUSCH: “This is cool man. This is right up there withn the best of them. I haven’t won the big ones, so this is as good as it gets right now.”
DAVID REUTIMANN: “We had that restart and you knew Kyle wasn’t going to roll over for anything, and Jimmie Johnson’s pretty intense too, so we just ended up coming in and Kyle threw a block to kill Jimmie’s momentum down the front. I had a little bit of run down the back and Jimmie was either going to go to the top or the bottom getting in and I was not going to go where he was.”
JIMMIE JOHNSON: “I think Kyle’s car was a little bit better than us at the end. The run before that it seemed like he was just a touch better, but I was going to try as hard as I could and got a good restart, was inside of him. My car really didn’t fire off on that last set of tires like I had seen earlier in the day.”
Of the 6 cautions, only one was for an accident, one was a competition caution, one for the #1 car stopped on the track and three for debris on the track.
Traffic was the big story for the weekend as several fans missed the race due to traffic backups and the lack of parking. The staff at Kentucky Speedway apologized for the problems and promised to make then right for the 2012 race.