Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick have been two of the best cars all season long. But for the first time all year, a race between them was decided by contact.
Harvick pushed Busch out of the way in the closing laps, surging ahead after applying a bump-and-run to win the Foxwoods Resort Casino 301. Busch wound up second, fading out of the picture after the No. 4 car pushed through to take control.
“I didn’t want to wreck him,” Harvick said after charging forward after the race’s final caution for Clint Bowyer hitting the wall. “But I didn’t want to waste a bunch of time behind him.”
So Harvick nudged three, four, five times until Busch finally lost control and slid up the racetrack. From there, he cruised to his season-high sixth win of the year and first since Kansas Mother’s Day Weekend.
“We weren’t the best car on the long run,” Busch said. “It was going to be hard to hold him off, I was just backing up. I’m not sure he had to do it, but he did it, that’s fine. How you race is how you get raced.”
Both drivers seized an opportunity when Aric Almirola had a bad final pit stop. Almirola, who looked to be in control of the race, fought back to third but fell too far behind to make a charge.
“You think I’d be really excited to run top 5 and I’m not,” Almirola said. “We had the best car. There’s no doubt in my mind. We gave it away on pit road and I gave it away on the restart by spinning the tires.”
Martin Truex Jr. was fourth while Chase Elliott rounded out the top-five finishers.
Elliott, who entered the weekend near the playoff bubble, was happy about his refreshing run toward the front, where the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports chassis earned its first stage win of 2018 and their best oval performance in months.
Ryan Newman earned his best finish of 2018, finishing sixth for Richard Childress Racing.
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 40+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.