Kyle Busch Doubles Up at Kentucky Speedway

Kyle Busch started the weekend by easily winning the Camping World Truck race at Kentucky on Thursday evening, then wrapped up the weekend by winning the inaugural NASCAR Sprint Cup race on Saturday night.

To add to his credit, the 26-year-old driver wound up on the pole for the Cup race because of being the fastest in practice, thereby inheriting the pole position because of qualifying being rained out.

With Busch leading by as much as eight seconds at times, the race became a snoozer until Brad Keselowski benefited from a different pit strategy and a quick car kept him out front during the middle stages.

In the closing segments, five-time champion Jimmie Johnson got up on the wheel to get around the top three, only to have Busch win the final two-lap shoot-out and his 23rd career trophy in the Cup division.

Not far behind Busch at the stripe included the cars of David Reutimann, Johnson, Ryan Newman and Carl Edwards.

Note: Junior Nation fans left the track with frowns once again as their favorite driver suffered a late race flat tire, badly tearing up the front left of the car and sending him down to a two lap down 30th place finish. Dale Earnhardt Jr had been running well on the day until the flat and also fell one spot to eighth in the overall standings.

Kevin Harvick came into this race with a narrow points lead over Carl Edwards, but a 16th place run dropped the RCR driver to third, 10 points away from new points leader Kyle Busch. 

Nationwide

Brad Keselowski used a fast car and a lucky fuel mileage gamble to win his first Nationwide race this season and 13th  career notch in the win column.

Kevin Harvick had a miscue on pit lane at the Kentucky track, denying him a shot at the win, yet took second with Kyle Busch, Kasey Kahne and new points leader Elliott Sadler wrapping up the top five finishers.

Truckin’

Despite starting last for missing the driver’s meeting, Kyle Busch also won the truck race, his 30th  trophy in that division. It did as if the person out front was cursed to win this one. Johnny Sauter led for many laps with a strong truck before breaking a rear axle leaving the pits. Austin Dillon was about to be all over Busch to take the lead, when his hood flipped up onto the trucks windshield, negating any serious effort there. And finally, in the closing laps Joey Coultar’s truck appeared to have the right stuff, until he missed a gear on the final restart, all leading up to Busch’s latest trophy with certainly NOT the fastest truck.

The final Kentucky rundown looked like a fast Parker Kliggerman second, followed by Brendan Gaughan, Todd Bodine and Jason White.

The points battle in the division has Sauter leading Cole Whitt by 23 points.

Open -Wheel News

The Indy Car series ran in Toronto Canada on a street course where there were more wrecks than an average Saturday night demo derby. Too many wrecks and some bad officiating saw Ganassi boys Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon take the top spots over Ryan Hunter-Reay and Marco Andretti.

Earlier in the race, Franchitti spun rival Will Power and series officials initially were going to call in the Scottish driver for a pass though penalty, then rescinded the call, something not very popular with drivers and fans alike.

Danica Patrick started deep ion the 26 car field and finished 19th , some six laps down, the result of being involved in several on the on-track incidents. She did look like a duck out of water all weekend. My little crystal ball says goodbye Indy Car and hello NASCAR for Manica.

Simona DeSilvestro started 17th  and finished a very credible 10th with the oldest car in the field.

Across The Pond 

The Formula One series ran at the beautiful Silverstone course in England where Team Red Bull dropped the ball during a pit stop, handing the lead over to Ferrari show Fernando Alonso, who went on to capture his first checkers of the season. Sixteen seconds back at the stripe were the cars of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber.

From Rumorville

Robby Gordon is said to be among the latest entrants to the famous Bullrun coast-to-coast race, similar to the Cannonball Run movie. Gordon will drive a factory backed Jeep Grand Cherokee with a potent Hemi under the hood among a host of off-road trucks, one of his companies is so famous for. The race lasts seven days with the drivers and navigators not knowing where they’re going until final second instructions are given. Sounds like fun! Check out coverage on SPEED TV.

That’s it for this week. Next week’s RWR will review the Cup and Nationwide action from New Hampshire, pick ’em results from Iowa, along with more racing news from around the globe.