Tires Popping, Cars Flying, GWC Finishes ... and oh yeah, Kurt Busch wins in Atlanta
Sunday’s Sprint Cup race at Atlanta Motor Speedway was a crazy affair, with tire issues, driver paybacks and multiple green-white-checker finishes. But it all happened in Kurt Busch’s rearview mirror. Busch, in his familiar No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge, led 129 laps en route to defending his Kobalt Tools 500 crown.
“I’m so happy to bring this car home to Victory Lane,” Busch said. “With Steve Addington [crew chief] and all his new ideas — I never knew how we could mesh them together and how soon we were [going to be] able to do it. We were able to get it right and hit it just perfect with the marks today. Even with all the restarts at the end I felt we had the car to beat.”
Matt Kenseth ended an under-the-radar run in second. Juan Pablo Montoya was third, Kasey Kahne led a race-high 144 laps and finished fourth. Paul Menard was fifth, his first career top-5 showing in Cup competition away from a restrictor-plate track.
The restarts Busch referred to were a pair of “overtime” periods needed complete a wild event that stretched to 526 miles from its advertised 500-mile distance.
With six laps remaining and Montoya tracking Busch down at the front of the field, Carl Edwards spun Brad Keselowski, who was running sixth at the time. Keselowski’s car turned backward on the frontstretch and lifted, flipping and landing roof-first in the wall.
The punt was triggered by what Edwards considered a slight earlier in the event when Keselowski and he got together in Turn 1, sending Edwards' No. 99 Ford skidding into the wall and effectively ending his day.
“He cut down on me on a restart,” Keselowski said of the earlier accident. “I lifted but I couldn’t lift fast enough — I lifted but he was there.
“We wreck racecars – that’s going to happen, and they happen out of the pursuit of competition and the aggression to go out and win. But they should not happen out of anger at tracks like this at this speed.
“The bottom line is, Carl is an awesome guy – one of the best in the garage. But he made a move that was uncalled for and cannot be tolerated in this sport, or we’re going to kill somebody."
Keselowski later stated he believed Edwards should be parked for the series’ next event, at Bristol, and possibly others. Edwards, who was 156 laps down at the time of the incident, admitted wrongdoing but didn’t apologize, only expressing relief that no one was injured.
“Well, Brad knows the deal between him and I,” Edwards said. “The scary part was that his car went airborne, which is not at all what I expected. At the end of the day, we come out here to race and people got to have respect for one another and I have a lot of respect for people’s safety.
“I wish that wouldn’t have gone like it did, but I’m glad he’s OK. We’ll just go on and race some more and maybe him and I won’t have anymore incidents together — that’d be the best thing.”
Edwards was parked following the altercation and met with NASCAR officials after the race. NASCAR Vice-President of Competition, Robin Pemberton, addressed the situation briefly, but was not ready to make any announcement concerning penalties to Edwards, only that the situation will be reviewed.
“We’ve talked to Carl,” Pemberton said. “It was a little bit aggressive out there, and he was frustrated. So, hopefully, moving forward, there won’t be anything negative that comes out of this by either party.
“We’ll go back to the R&D Center on Monday and Tuesday with our internal group and discuss if there’s anything else [penalties].”
Once the dust settled from the Edwards/Keselowski melee, Clint Bowyer and Menard — who each took only two right side tires — started on the front row for the first green-white-checker finish. Busch was lined up on the outside of row 2 when the green waved and immediately shot the gap between the two heading into Turn 1.
As Busch sprinted away, Kahne dove below Jamie McMurray going into Turn 3, loosening up his No. 1 Chevy. That triggered a multi-car entanglement, as McMurray slid into Bowyer and then collected Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr., Mark Martin and Denny Hamlin, among others.
When the green waved a second time, it was Busch leading the way with Montoya to his outside. Montoya, though, spun his tires while trying to keep pace with the No. 2 machine, and bottled up the high lane, allowing the 2004 Cup champ to pull away.
“It caught me by surprise,” Montoya said of Busch's restart. “ We had those two lines we’re supposed to start with [restart lines painted on the outside wall] and he went, like, 40 yards before the first line and he really surprised me. It’s not a big deal, he deserves to win … just want to make sure for the next time that NASCAR knows about it.”
NASCAR did not deem that Busch jumped the start, and from there he was spot-on, hitting every mark and pulling away for a .482-second win, the 21st of his career and third at AMS.
The early and middle stages of the event were plagued by tire issues. All four Hendrick Motorsports cars had problems, including pole-sitter Dale Earnhardt Jr. and HMS satellite cars driven by Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman.
"I think it's one of those things where when they come here and test, and you expect them to build a tire that we can abuse, and that we can race hard with,” Jeff Gordon said. “That obviously wasn't the case.
"There is a good chance we were too aggressive, but until we go back and analyze everything it's hard to say."
Goodyear held a tire test at Atlanta earlier in the year to determine the race compounds with Gordon’s teammate, Martin, along with Edwards, Truex and Sam Hornish Jr.
Stu Grant, General Manager of Worldwide Racing for Goodyear, addressed the issues in the media center during the event, citing punctures and aggressive camber setups as the main culprits of the failures.
"The majority of the cars are looking great,” Grant stated. “Kurt Busch and Kasey Kahne have been running up front all day, and their tires look great.
“Early on we saw a number of clear punctures. Robby Gordon had a punctured left rear, Clint Bowyer had a clear puncture in the right rear. Mark Martin had a punctured left rear.
"The other thing we're seeing now is some damaged inside shoulders on the right front. We have not seen an air loss due to that. But they'll come in when they feel a vibration, with the inside shoulder of the right front damaged. It's just that they're aggressive on their setups, perhaps. But clearly they're showing some abuse on the inside of the right-front shoulder.
"It's a handling and setup related thing, something they can control — and they need to do that.”
Newman, for one, did not agree, saying, "Goodyear's got some work to do. It's a safety situation. We popped one; there are a lot of guys who popped one.
"It was too sensitive for the guys who didn't get it right. The guys who had their cars just right, yeah, they didn't have any issues, but either way they've got a little bit more work to do here.”
Busch jumped nine spots in the point standings to 10th by virtue of the win. Kevin Harvick, who suffered through a miserable day but rebounded for a ninth-place finish, holds the lead in the early-season standings by 26 points over Kenseth. Greg Biffle (eighth at Atlanta) is third, Jimmie Johnson (12th) fourth and Bowyer (23rd) fifth.
