LONG POND, Pa. — Kyle Larson held off polesitter and Stage 1 winner Kyle Busch during a one-lap dash to notch the win in Stage 2 of Sunday’s Axalta presents the Pocono 400 at Pocono Raceway.
Larson led the final eight laps of the stage, having assumed the point during a cycle of pit stops, before a two-car crash on lap 95 set up the dash to the green-checkered flag.
Sunday marked Larson’s third Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series stage win of the season.
“I’ve been pretty happy with our Target Chevrolet,” Larson said following pit stops. “Everybody made some good adjustments overnight … at least they told me they made a lot of adjustments; I don’t know if they actually did. It’s been handling really good today, though.”
“I felt like in that last green flag stop that we had, our fire off speed was really, really good. Our long run speed is decent, I just couldn’t get through traffic like the (No.) 4 (of Harvick) and (No.) 24 (of Elliott), but I’ll clean that up and we will be up there at the end of the race.”
What had been an incident-free race through Stage 1 continued as such when green-flag racing resumed at the start of the second stage, with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. leading the field to a restart on lap 57.
After staying out, Stenhouse’s older tires quickly faded him back in the pack as Erik Jones rose to the point, but it only took three laps from there before Busch was back in command.
Busch led all the way until his next pit stop on lap 90, opening up as much as a 21-second margin before coming down for service.
That began a cycle of leaders that included Daniel Suarez and Denny Hamlin, before Kyle Larson assumed the lead in the closing laps of the stage.
Larson led until five to go, when seventh-running Jimmie Johnson and ninth-running Jamie McMurray had near-simultaneous brake failures on entry to Turn 1, both shooting hard into the outside wall and sustaining race-ending damage.
Johnson crouched down next to the wall after climbing from his car, winded from a hard hit to the rear of his Chevrolet, while McMurray bailed out in a hurry as his car was consumed by flames on the bottom of the Long Pond straightaway.
Both drivers were uninjured and walked away, while the incident sparked a 23-minute red flag for cleanup before the stage-deciding one-lap shootout.
Though Busch surged from fourth to second on the final lap of the stage, he had to settle for second, .197 of a second back of Larson as they crossed the stripe.
Martin Truex Jr. was third, followed by Kevin Harvick and Chase Elliott.
Rookie Erik Jones, Brad Keselowski, Kurt Busch, Kasey Kahne and Matt Kenseth completed the top 10 and all scored bonus points at the stage break.
About the Writer
Jacob Seelman is the Managing Editor of Race Chaser Online and creator of the Motorsports Madness radio show, airing at 7 p.m. Eastern every Monday on the Performance Motorsports Network.
Seelman grew up in the sport, watching his grandparents co-own the RaDiUs Motorsports NASCAR Cup Series team in the 1990s.
The 23-year-old is currently studying Broadcast Journalism at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., and is also serving as the full-time tour announcer for the Must See Racing Sprint Car Series.
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