The green flag returned with 14 to go and a hotly-contested battle for the win saw five consecutive laps tick off with a different leader. Keselowski led off the gun to complete lap 287, but Busch fired a dive-bomb move to the inside of turn one to lead lap 288 – the only circuit he topped all night long.
The next time by it was Keselowski again in the middle of a three-wide skirmish that ultimately saw Ty Dillon take advantage of the inside groove to power through and lead lap 290.
Keselowski and Busch, though, would seemingly not be denied and move back to the top two spots on the 291st round – setting the stage for a clash of the titans in the final laps at ‘The Last Great Coliseum’.
That clash boiled over with five laps to go, when Busch attempted a slide job for the lead in turn two and came across Keselowski’s nose as the pair spilled out onto the backstretch.
The resulting contact squeezed Keselowski into the outside wall before turning Busch into it as well, and by the time Busch was in turn three, his right front tire had let go and Ty Dillon had plowed into the rear of his No. 18 Toyota as he slowed in the corner.
Busch’s assessment of the accident?
“He (Keselowski) is a dirty driver.”
Keselowski’s response came later, after he had run out of fuel entering turn one four laps past the scheduled 300 lap distance and faded to 12th in the final rundown.
“What can you say? I guess it happens. We weren’t as fast as we wanted to be all weekend; but we had a lot of heart and fought as hard as we could. I was playing jam car on the 18 and 42. They were really good and probably had the speed to win today. I was doing all I could to hold them back and just ran out there at the end.”
“Kyle was quite a bit faster. He got a good run on the bottom and the bottom groove was just a little bit faster in one and two than it was in three and four. He knew that and made a really smart move and got up next to me, but I had a big run on exit and he wasn’t quite clear. I knew he needed to come up … and he knew he needed to come up and there just wasn’t enough room. I was already there and it clipped him in the right-rear. I don’t really know what happened from there, but it was tough. We were battling really hard and I definitely didn’t want to see it end that way.”
Once that sequence of events handed Dillon the lead and the win, the battle for second saw Justin Allgaier ultimately top Larson for the position, giving Chevrolet drivers a sweep of the podium.
For Larson, however, it was hardly any consolation.
“It’s disappointing,” the California native said. “We were really good tonight. I thought the 18 and the 20 were better than we were but after about 30 or 40 laps I think I was right there with them. I was loose on the restarts, and lining up on the bottom didn’t help. When the 22 ran out before that last one I knew it was our last shot to get a win and it didn’t quite work out for us.”
“We’d love to get a win at Bristol … we just keep coming up short.”
Elliott Sadler and Brendan Gaughan rounded out the top five ahead of Jeremy Clements, who notched his first career top 10 finish on a short track.
Darrell Wallace Jr. was the highest-finishing Ford in seventh and Corey LaJoie led the Toyota camp with a career-best of 10th.
The NASCAR XFINITY Series returns to action on Aug. 27 with their third and final road course race of the season at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.
