Monday Racing Roundup: Logano 2-for-2 in Contender Round with Kansas Win

Block me once, and I’ll cut you some slack.

Block me twice — and it’s "Gotcha."

That, in essence, was the conversation on Joey Logano’s team radio after Logano spun race leader Matt Kenseth in Turn 1 with less than five laps left on Sunday at Kansas Speedway.

Logano went on to win the race after a green-white-checkered-flag restart that sent the race two laps past its scheduled distance of 267 laps. The driver of the No. 22 Team Penske Ford has monopolized the Contender Round of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, having won back-to-back races at Charlotte and Kansas.

The victory was Logano’s second at the 1.5-mile track — the first coming in last year’s Chase — his fifth of the season and the 13th of his career. But it may have come at the expense of the title hopes of the driver who replaced him in the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota.

He finished .491 seconds ahead of runner-up Denny Hamlin, who held off Jimmie Johnson at the stripe to take the second spot. Johnson ran third, followed by Kasey Kahne and Kyle Busch.

Desperately needing a victory to revive his chances to make the cut for the Chase’s Eliminator 8 Round, Kenseth had grabbed the lead from Jimmie Johnson after a restart on Lap 248. Using all his skills to keep the faster car of Logano behind him, Kenseth blocked Logano on the frontstretch as the duo ran up on lapped cars near the start/finish line.

Kenseth moved up to block again as he entered Turn 1, but a tap from Logano’s Ford sent the No. 20 Camry spinning.

Kenseth kept his car off the wall and finished 14th, but the result was far more costly than a mere 13 positions. After finishing 42nd at Charlotte a week earlier, Kenseth could have salvaged his season with a victory and a guaranteed entry into the Eliminator 8 Round.

Now Kenseth, who is 35 points out of the final transfer position (eighth place), likely must win at Talladega to advance.

Understandably upset by the outcome, Kenseth had a clear-cut view of the incident.

"It was really cut and dry," Kenseth said. "He (Logano) picked my rear tires off the ground and wrecked me, so there’s no debate about that one… He was a little bit tighter on that short run than I was, and I couldn’t get away from him.

"All day we had him pretty good. I still thought I was going to be able to stay in front of him and saw those lapped cars coming and tried getting a couple runs off the top there and I was plenty clear, got up in front of him and he just decided to take us out."

To Logano, it was merely a case of aggressive racing on the part of both drivers. As Logano pursued Kenseth during the decisive run, Logano was squeezed into the outside wall, scraping the right side of his car.

"It was good, hard racing," Logano said. "We were racing each other really hard, and I got in the fence twice on the straightaways. He raced me hard, and I raced him hard back. That’s the way I race. If I get raced like that, I’ll race the same way. 

NASCAR XFINITY Series: Kyle Busch gets 75th career XFINITY win

Overcoming obstacles in the XFINITY Series is commonplace for Kyle Busch.

In Saturday’s race at Kansas Speedway, Busch brushed aside a pit road speeding penalty, a hole in the nose of his No. 54 Toyota, a pit stop that dropped him to seventh for the penultimate restart, an unwelcome green-white-checkered-flag restart and a teammate who had the fastest car for much of the afternoon.

The end result was Busch’s 75th XFINITY Series victory, extending his own record. Busch won for third time at Kansas and for the fifth time in 20 starts this season.

The race also saw Chris Buescher add one point to his series lead over Chase Elliott. Though both drivers had issues — Elliott a wreck during qualifying that sent him to a backup car and the back of the field; and Buescher a pit road speeding penalty — Buescher won a drag race to the stripe to come home sixth to Elliott’s seventh and leads the standings by 27 points over the defending champion.

But the final 43 laps of the event were vintage Kyle Busch. Restarting seventh on Lap 157 after the seventh caution of the afternoon, Busch surged into second place in a single lap. For the next 28 circuits he harried teammate and eventual runner-up Matt Kenseth before clearing his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate through Turn 4 on Lap 185.

Busch survived a green-white-checkered after Joey Gase’s engine blew and oiled the 1.5-mile track with five laps left. Picking the outside lane, Busch cleared Kenseth entering the first turn and pulled away to win by .607 seconds.