“He’s right. That was the third time he’d driven into me during the night,” Stewart said. “How many times does a guy get a free pass until you’ve had enough of it? He’s got to do his part racing for a championship too and racing to get in there and if you’re going to run into guys … I go into one and he dive bombs in there and I was already coming down. So it’s not like I was trying to squeeze him into the infield or something. Ryan and I have been good friends. I don’t do that to him.”
“He hits me in one, he hits me off of two and that was the third time by that time. There was once earlier in the race that nobody saw. That’s three times, that’s two more times then I usually let people run into me.”
After a 20-minute red flag and a round of pit stops for some of the back runners on the lead lap, the field came back to green with 32 laps to go with Denny Hamlin out front and a hard-charging Kyle Busch giving chase.
Busch powered past both Kyle Larson and Martin Truex Jr. to take second on the outside lane, while Hamlin opened up a second and a half lead over the field.
What looked like it would be a runaway, however, turned interesting as Regan Smith spun before Hamlin could get to the white flag – setting up the overtime finish as multiple cars ducked down pit road for fresh Goodyear rubber in an attempt to challenge down the final stretch.
Larson came the closest, but simply didn’t have enough time to get to Hamlin over the final mile and a half of racing despite passing Truex — who led 193 laps earlier in the race — for second in the final corner.
“It felt like a video game on rookie mode, there at the end,” Larson said of having fresh tires on the two-lap dash. “That was fun. We were probably an eighth to 10th place car for most of the race, but I was really good on short runs and that helped us on that last restart.”
Brad Keselowski and Kevin Harvick completed the top five.
While Hamlin celebrated in victory lane, Chris Buescher, Chase Elliott, Austin Dillon and Jamie McMurray were the final four drivers to lock down positions on the Chase Grid and added their names to the list of 16 championship contenders.
Buescher secured his place in the Chase with a win at Pocono Raceway in August, but had to maintain a position inside the top 30 in points to utilize it for Chase entry. He managed to do that thanks to issues for 31st-place points man David Ragan, who was collected in the accident that eliminated Newman, finishing 24th on the track in the end and putting Front Row Motorsports in the Chase for the first time.
Meanwhile, Elliott, Dillon and McMurray were the three winless drivers who secured their berths on points, finishing 19th, 13th and seventh, respectively.
Kasey Kahne was sixth at the checkered flag and was ultimately the first driver below the Chase cutoff line in 17th.
“I tried, and I wanted to (win and get into the Chase),” Kahne said. “But Denny was fast. Truex was fast. I stayed right with Truex on the restart, but the inside lane just took off better. I wanted to win, but Denny was a good bit better than we were.”
“We got up there because of the right pit call and when we pitted for tires. When everyone else pitted, they were just too far behind us to get us back, so it worked out. We were a fourth-place car at best, and we ended up sixth … so we were good tonight. We just weren’t good enough.”
