Yahoo Autos Carl Edwards Wins Richmond On Last-Second Bump-And-Run
With all five of their team-affiliated cars finishing in the top ten in today's Sprint Cup Series race at Richmond, it's a nice time to be driving a Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. The team's raw speed is seemingly enough to guarantee at least a shot at a win every weekend for each and every one of their drivers, but even if they have the speed to get past the rest of the grid, they still have to watch out for internal competition. The season has already seen some notable finishes decided between JGR drivers (most notably, the end of the Daytona 500), and while those have all been amicable, at some point there comes a time when even teammates are willing to put it all on the line for a win. Unfortunately for Kyle Busch, today was the day internal finally boiled over and he was decidedly not the benefactor of the exchange.
Busch, who had led just 78 of 400 laps over the course of the race but had a comfortable lead for the majority of the race's final stint, was clearly ahead of Carl Edwards with ten laps to go. With five to go, the gap was shrinking, but given that he had just a teammate to beat, there was little reason to worry. With one to go, Edwards knew that the race would likely be JGR's fourth-straight win no matter what happened, and when he saw the opportunity to take his second short track win in a row, he made his move.
The textbook execution of the bump-and-run unsettled Busch with plenty of room to wash up the track and retain second, easily promoting Edwards into the lead and propelling him towards a win without damaging his teammate's race any further than what could benefit him. With wins not really mattering in the grand scheme of the championship for either Busch or Edwards after today (both have two, enough to formally guarantee a spot in the Chase in the event that there are more race winners than Chase spots come September, though conventional wisdom says that 17 different winners in 26 races is exceedingly unlikely anyway), the win doesn't really change the landscape of the season at all, but it's a nice result nonetheless for a driver who didn't quite meet expectations in his one-win 2015 campaign.
Though their short track package is seemingly unmatched, the bad news for the Toyota contingent is that this was the final short track race for NASCAR, which inexplicably packs its six best races in two short windows and confines them all to the same region of the nation, until late August. Whether or not what they're doing on these shorter tracks still works and still offers an advantage come October's Chase race at Martinsville is a serious question for the team, just one of the intricacies of NASCAR's Chase postseason system.
Behind the Toyota teams, Chase Elliott was again the weekend's highest finishing rookie. A twelfth today isn't as impressive as his back-to-back top fives in previous weeks, but the rate at which he's gotten up to speed with his Hendrick Motorsports team seems to be quick enough to already give him a significant edge on his primary competition, Penske-affiliated Wood Brothers rookie Ryan Blaney, who would finish 28th. Tony Stewart's first weekend of racing in his final season would end in a mediocre 19th, around where he ran for most of the race, despite cutting down a tire by making contact with Joey Logano on a mid-race restart.
NASCAR's next race is its second of the season at a superspeedway, the traditional Spring 500 miler at Talladega.
