Harvick finds way to win at Bristol – 24 hours later

Rain delays are an occasional fact of life race track owners have to deal with, although it hasn’t been nearly as prevalent in NASCAR in the 2016 season.

With this weekend’s Bass Pro Shops/NRA Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway, that notion was completely thrown out the window.
Rain messed with the track enough to stop the 500-lap battle after only 48 trips around the “World’s Fastest Half-Mile” on Saturday. Then came the attempt to restart the race the next day, and more rain added to the waiting game.
Finally, nearly 24 hours after the scheduled start, the Bristol Night-Turned-To-Day-Turned-To-Late-Afternoon-Early-Evening Race saw Kevin Harvick make the trip to Victory Lane, his second of the season.
And the wait for those who stayed at the track and eventually found it on TV (CNBC, after originally being set for NBC Sports Network) was more than worth it.
Before we settle in with what Harvick did, there were enough surprises in the final finishing order to give the skeptics less reason to be picky. The first one came with the runner-up effort from Ricky Stenhouse Jr., by far the best of his career.
Stenhouse delivered a top-5 run for just the sixth time in 135 career starts and matched what he did in the Bristol spring race in 2014. In the greatest of ironies, he started 25th, and none other than Harvick was just in front of him on the grid.
There were the usual suspects from the Joe Gibbs Racing camp who were high in the final order. Denny Hamlin made up two laps, led 19, and finished third. Pole sitter Carl Edwards led 31 laps and finished sixth.
But shocker No. 2 of the race came as Kyle Busch led 256 laps, but a broken suspension part and the appearance of Justin Allgaier’s No. 46 car at the worst possible time – lap 359 – led to a 39th-place finish. It only added to the frustration at Bristol for the defending Sprint Cup champion.
“We’ve been having parts failures here, so something we’ve got to address and fix,” Busch said in a NASCAR Wire Service story. “I’m really tired of losing races here with parts falling apart, so they’ll hear about it on Tuesday.”
Busch wasn’t happy with Allgaier and his spotter, either.
“I’ve been wrecking for half a lap and they just come on through and clean us out,” he said. “That’s stupid, so I don’t know – frustrating day. Let’s go home.”
The stat book shows Busch’s frustration with Bristol pretty clearly, in spite of his five Cup wins there. Since the last one in the spring race of 2011, his average finish over the 10-race span is 21.5, and he’s been 29th or worse in four of his last five races at BMS.
Once Busch found himself out of contention, Harvick led 104 of the final 153 laps (128 in total) and became the fifth driver in the two-win club in 2016, joining Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth, Edwards and Hamlin.
But the most impressive story in a non-winning role came from Chris Buescher. He fell back to mid-pack through the early portion of the race at Bristol, but somehow ended up finishing fifth. It was just as good as Matt DiBenedetto’s sixth-place run in the spring, but this one carries a little more impact for Buescher because he zoomed past David Ragan into the top 30 in points, where he is eligible for the Chase.
Buescher’s cushion isn’t quite secure with three races remaining until the Chase, but a 13-point edge is a pretty good foundation to build on. It also gave drivers like Kyle Larson and Trevor Bayne more reason to worry.
With Buescher in the Chase as the 12th driver with a win, that leaves Ryan Newman as the last of the four non-winners who would advance. His lead is at 35 points over Bayne, while Larson is tied with Kasey Kahne, 39 off the pace.
That’s basically a full race with three challenging tracks left: Michigan (a 2-mile party of speed), Darlington (two unpredictable ends), and Richmond (go or go home). A win will change things for the better, and it may be the only option they have left.

Follow Tom Zulewski on Twitter @Tomzsports or email tominator19@yahoo.com.

NEXT WEEK'S RACES

Michigan International Speedway (2-mile oval), Brooklyn, Michigan

-SPRINT CUP: Pure Michigan 400, Sunday, 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, NBC Sports Network. Radio: SiriusXM Channel 90 or your local MRN Radio affiliate.

Race distance: 400 miles, 200 laps.

2015 champion: Matt Kenseth

-CAMPING WORLD TRUCK SERIES: Careers for Veterans 200, Saturday, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT, Fox Sports 1. Radio: SiriusXM Channel 90 or your local MRN Radio affiliate.

Race distance: 200 miles, 100 laps.

2015 champion: Kyle Busch.

-XFINITY SERIES: Road America 180, Road America (4.048-mile road course), Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, Saturday, 3 p.m. ET/Noon PT, NBC Sports Network. Radio: SiriusXM Channel 90 or your local MRN Radio affiliate.

Race distance: 182.2 miles, 45 laps.

2015 champion: Paul Menard