It was a tale of two drives with the stage winners, Kyle Busch and Chase Elliott, in the Tales of the Turtles 400 at Chicagoland Speedway.
Leading the field to the green flag, Busch lead all but two laps during the first cycle of green flag stops on his way to winning the first stage. Leading the field back to green on Lap 88, Kevin Harvick powered by his outside to take the lead exiting Turn 2.
Busch was running second when he made an unscheduled stop on Lap 97 for a loose wheel. Adding insult to injury, he was hit with a pass through penalty for his crew jumping over the wall too soon. He rejoined the race in 27th, two-laps down.
He came close to getting back on the lead lap, being the first car a lap down, but race leader Martin Truex Jr. passed Landon Cassill just five laps before Erik Jones suffered a right-rear tire blowout and spun out in Turn 4 on Lap 210, bringing out the fourth caution of the race.
Busch brought his car home to a 15th-place finish.
“Oh well. We’ll move on…next week. That’s all we can do.”
For Elliott, it was a more stable and stronger run.
After a third-place finish in the first stage, he exited pit road just feet ahead of Harvick on Lap 124, cycled to the lead the following lap and drove onto victory in the second stage.
As was the case with Busch, Elliott lost the lead on the ensuing restart to Harvick — this time, sliding up ion front up him from the bottom lane — exiting Turn 2 on Lap 168.
He didn’t regain the lead, but he did retake and finish second when the checkered flag flew.
“Yeah, just a much-improved day from where we’ve been, which is nice,” Elliott said in his post-race media availability. “Obviously would have been great to battle with Martin a little bit more. We didn’t have anything for him. From where we’ve been to where we ran today was a major, major step in the right direction, frankly where we need to be, where we deserve to be, to the potential we can run.
“It was nice to see that we can do it if all things are clicking in the right way, car is driving good, pit stops are good, race execution was nice. It was a pretty uneventful race for the most part.
“I felt like typically when that happens, the better cars always kind of end up towards the front. That proved to be with Martin winning. I didn’t have anything for him, without a restart or something. It also proved that we were second to him. I’m not sure about the 18, if he could have got back up there.
“Aside from those two, I feel like we could run about everybody else. That’s a lot better than we’ve been.”
Busch leaves fifth in points, trailing Truex by 41, while Elliott leaves sixth, 43 back of Truex.
