TALLADEGA, Alabama — With cars wrecking behind him, Brad Keselowski took the checkered flag in the Geico 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday.
“I didn’t have a great frame to see what happened to everyone else,” Keselowski said. “The guys at Team Penske gave me a great Miller Lite Ford, and this Fusion was hauling it. One of the best tickets to stay out of the wrecks at Talladega is if you can stay up front, and you’ve got a great shot of not getting wrecked.”
Keselowski became the fourth driver to claim two wins just 10 races into the season.
“I’m so proud of everybody at Team Penske,” Keselowski said. “To be back in victory lane with two wins this year, and we feel like we can get a lot more. We’re growing as a team. We made a lot of changes at Team Penske, and this feels really good, really good.”
Kyle Busch finished second, Austin Dillon was third and Chase Elliott and Jamie McMurray finished fourth and fifth, respectively.
Meanwhile, Kevin Harvick, who had led near the midpoint of the race, was caught up in a multi-car wreck that also involved Martin Truex Jr., A.J. Allmendinger, Bobby Labonte and Ricky Stenhouse Jr., among others.
Prior to the final-lap wreck, the yellow flag waved nine times throughout the race.
Keselowski restarted with the lead on the final restart with three laps to go. When the race returned to green, Busch pushed him out front and took second for himself. As Keselowski maintained his lead, Busch and Dillon battled for second.
With rain in the area, drivers and teams thought they may be racing to the halfway point of the race. As a result, when the race reached the halfway point of its 188-lap scheduled distance, the field was three-wide behind then-leader, Keselowski.
The yellow flag waved just a few laps past halfway but not for rain. Instead the caution came for a multi-car wreck that saw Chris Buescher’s car get airborne and flip three times before coming to rest right-side-up.
“It was so quick. I never had any time to react,” Buescher said. “We got clipped in the right-rear, and as soon as it turned, it went up on its lid. I thought we were clear of the wreck. I saw it happening in front of us and checked up, and the next thing I knew, I was upside down. I am pretty sick and tired of speedway racing at this point. It has been a rough year for that. We felt like we were decent this race. We were holding our own and waiting, but here we are. It is unfortunate.”
Buescher wasn’t the only driver who went for a loop. Matt Kenseth, who led several laps and ran near the front throughout the race, was caught up in an incident with Danica Patrick with eight laps to go. He got airborne and flipped before coming to rest right-side-up near the inside retaining wall.
Joey Logano and Kevin Harvick, also frontrunners throughout the race, also were among the drivers caught up in the wreck.
Elliott started on the pole and led the first 13 laps before giving up the top spot to Kenseth. Kenseth and his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Busch, among others, led laps before Elliott got back to the front just past halfway. Elliott had gotten slightly behind when he drove off pit road without drafting help during a green-flag cycle of stops just before lap 40.
While Elliott was a front-runner throughout the race, his Hendrick Motorsports teammates weren’t as fortunate. Dale Earnhardt Jr. spun and collected teammate Kasey Kahne to bring out the first caution on lap 50.
“We had a real bad problem at the first run; the splitter was on the ground real bad,” Earnhardt said. “I was really tight and couldn’t run anywhere but up against the wall. We made some adjustments to help the car, and the splitter was still on the ground really bad. I got in a bad area with the wind and the air, and it just got loose and spun out.”
On lap 110, Earnhardt’s day went from bad to worse, this time getting caught up in a wreck with Joe Gibbs Racing driver Carl Edwards.
“The biggest thing is, just something just let go there, and you hate to collect anybody, so definitely sorry to the 88 (Earnhardt) guys for getting their car involved in that,” Edwards said. “We had something torn up there; drove down into turn one, and I just felt the right-front fall down and that was it. You’re kind of just along for the ride.”
Kahne and fellow-Hendrick driver Jimmie Johnson, like Earnhardt, also got caught up in two wrecks. Kahne wrecked again with 61 laps to go. Johnson was involved in the multi-car wreck just past halfway and a 17-car wreck with 28 laps to go.