Matt Kenseth remained tough while running, or blocking, machines to the apron, while attempting to maintain the race lead in the closing laps. However, Jimmie Johnson coasted around him in the remaining moments handing the 2003 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion another thrashing.
The 2013 season was arguably the best season of Matt Kenseth’s career. Seven wins, 12 top-fives and 20 top-10s, very impressive stats by anyone’s standards. He also came up just short of a championship, finishing second to six-time series champion, Jimmie Johnson.
When it comes to driving for a championship, nobody has done it better this past decade than Jimmie Johnson. Collecting six of the past eight season titles gives a fellow a certain reputation.
Jeff Gordon: Gordon took the lead with eight laps to go and held off the hard-changing Kevin Harvick to take the checkered flag at Kansas. It was Gordon’s first win this season and third career win at Kansas Speedway.
There are three major stars in NASCAR’s constellation of drivers. They are simply called Jimmie, Junior, and Jeff, and few could argue that this trio has shone the brightest. Jimmie Johnson has six championships, including five in a row.
Surprising: Weird and freaky things continue to happen at NASCAR races and the Kansas race was no exception. The lights went dark on the back stretch, the speedy dry truck lost a gear, and the car that was ‘Freaky Fast’, starting from the pole with a new track record, just could not pull off the victory, coming in second instead.
Kansas is not as sexy as Talladega, I admit. It is not a Daytona, a Darlington, and it is no Indianapolis. I think having the race named after a series of sponsors instead of seeking a real identity might have something to do with that. Still, some big names have been among the 16 winners there since they first started up the engines back in 2001.
There are things in life that just irritate a person. There are calls for me to worry about man-made global warming when I got snow falling outside in the month of May. There are three hours of television devoted to a two-minute horse race. There are entertaining races from Talladega, with big names leading, big names wrecking, only to have the thing won by Denny Hamlin.
A guy grabs you and pushes you around. The universally accepted response is a punch to the other guy’s head. My dad taught me that, and so I taught my sons. It is a simple case of cause and effect, you push to start a confrontation and a punch usually will end it.
We are only a quarter of the way through the 2014 season and there have already been more memorable finishes than all of last year. At Daytona, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. held off a hard charging Denny Hamlin to win his 2nd Daytona 500. Two weeks later at Las Vegas, Brad Keselowski passed Dale Earnhardt, Jr. on the last lap to score the victory.
