Photo Credit: Justin McFarland
There was only one word to describe Kyle Busch’s Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Perfection.
Busch went from winning the pole by winning all three rounds of Saturday’s afternoon’s qualifying to absolutely dominating the Boyd Gaming 300, leading 199 of 200 laps, holding off his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Daniel Suarez by .817 seconds to score his 78th career Xfinity Series win and first career Xfinity Series win at LVMS.
For as easy as the victory was, Busch said there was some concerns about fuel during the final run and about his teammate Suarez who was charging in the closing laps.
“Suarez was definitely faster than us when he got clean track,” Busch said. “If roles were reversed, he would have been pulling away from me and I wasn’t going to be able to catch him. All in all, just a great day for us in one, two, three and for me to get a victory here in my home town, check one off the list — that’s pretty awesome.”
Daniel Suarez continued to impress in the Xfinity Series with a second place run on Saturday. However his first career Xfinity Series win continues to elude him and was disappointed with not making a charge sooner during the final green flag run of the afternoon.
“I just felt like it took too much time to find out how to be fast with a loose car in traffic,” Suarez said. “It took me 10 laps and he had two seconds there, and it was difficult to catch those two seconds back. I’m just proud of everyone at Joe Gibbs Racing. They did an amazing job. One of the fastest cars all day long”.
Erik Jones completed the dominant performance by Joe Gibbs Racing by rallying from two pit road speeding penalties to finish third.
“Overall, to fall back again and another solid day out of it, another top-three finish,” Jones said. “The one thing is that we’ve had good racecars these last couple of race, with Kyle winning and us up in the top-five Just wish that we could’ve been in contention during the race. Just go to next week and try again.”
Rounding out the top ten in the Boyd Gaming 300 were Chase Elliott in fourth, followed by Austin Dillon, Brandon Jones, Ty Dillon, Elliott Sadler, Justin Allgaier, and Brendan Gaughan.
The race was delayed by a lengthy red flag on lap 135 after an incident between Cody Ware, Darrell Wallace Jr. and Justin Marks. All three drivers checked out okay in the infield care center and Wallace gave his take on the incident.
“Just a bummer. We were kind of running our own race there and racing the 98 there, so we were focused on him,” Wallace said. “Then I saw the 25 – by the time I saw him, it was too late. It’s just a bummer. We’ll move on to Phoenix as we gained a lot there last year.”
When asked whether it was a case of the spotter not giving him enough notice, Wallace shrugged it off.
Freddie did a helluva job, as he always did. By the time he called it, I was already in pitch, and when I slowed it down, it just came around out from under me”.
