Logano leads 107 laps from pole for his first win in 40 races.
- Joey Logano won his first Cup race Sunday since the Bristol Dirt race last year.
- For the second Darlington race in a row, Kyle Busch made an early exit.
- Willam Byron was leading coming to the final lap, but Logano had other ideas.
For much of Sunday afternoon’s Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway it seemed like everyone was racing under double-secret probation. At the legendary track notorious for bad behavior, beating and banging, and wreck after wreck, drivers were mostly on their best behavior.
Which made Kyle Busch’s highlight-reel exit and Joey Logano’s bump-and-run winning pass coming for the white flag all the more surprising.
NASCAR’s best ran 293 laps around the witchy 1.367-mile track that is among the circuit’s most unforgiving. There was an early “competition caution” and scheduled cautions to end Stages 1 and 2. Other than those, the caution waved only six times, including four times for single-car incidents. All in all, it wasn’t the most scintillating show among the track’s 122 features dating to 1950.
One of the six involved Busch and triggered another of his trademark emotional reactions to adversity. He was involved when Brad Keselowski blew a tire and pinned Busch against the wall at lap 168. When it became clear Busch’s car was too damaged to continue, he manhandled it to the main entrance to the garage, then abruptly shut it down, climbed out, and walked to his nearby hauler, leaving the car in an awkward spot.
The scene was similar to last year’s spring race, when Busch angrily drove his damaged car into the garage after crashing out. He was fined $50,000 for running over some orange cones en route to his hauler. He hit a few cones near where pedestrians were standing, and crewmen were working in the garage. On Sunday, he said he abandoned his Toyota because he said he couldn’t steer it any farther.
That might have been the highlight of the race if William Byron had cruised into victory lane as it seemed likely the final moments. But Logano ran him down from several seconds behind and gave him an unapologetic solid shot entering Turn 3. Byron slammed the wall as Logano passed on the bottom en route to the white flag. The checkered flag about 30 seconds later marked his first victory this season for Team Penske and his first since the Bristol dirt more than a year ago.
“Yeah, you’re not going to put me in the wall and not get anything back,” Logano said afterward, referencing an earlier incident when they were side-by-side on a restart. “That’s how that works. I don’t know if he meant to get into me and fence me, but he did. At that point, I felt like it was game on.”
Understandably, Byron didn’t hold back his emotions. “We were really close off Turn 2 and I think it spooked him,” Byson said of an earlier incident. “It got him tight and he was right against the wall, and I got the lead. He’s an idiot; he does this stuff all the time; I’ve seen it with other guys. Yeah, he’s a moron. He can’t win a race, so it does it that way.
“He drove in there (Turn 3 on the white-flag lap) 10 miles an hour too fast, and with these Next-Gen cars he slammed me so hard it knocked the whole right side off the car. There was no way to make the corner. We were faster than him. At the end, the right rear started to go away. He didn’t even make it a contest.”
After starting from the pole, Logano led eight times for a race high 107 of the 293 laps, including the final two. He won by 0.775 seconds over Tyler Reddick, then Justin Haley, Kevin Harvick, Chase Elliott, Christopher Bell, Michael McDowell, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Austin Dillon, and Daniel Suárez. Byron limped back to 13th after having hit the wall after Logano‘s ramming.
Denny Hamlin led 42 laps, Kyle Larson 30, Martin Truex Jr. 28, Ross Chastain 26, Byron 24, and Busch 19. Of that group of front-runners, Byron was the only one running at the finish.
Keyword: Hard Feelings at Darlington as NASCAR’s Joey Logano Punts William Byron