Wild finish at Atlanta, but no one can catch Kurt Busch when they finally take checkered

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Kurt Busch wins again at Atlanta after 2 crashes

HAMPTON, Ga. — Kurt Busch won again at Atlanta Motor Speedway, pulling away on a second restart Sunday after a couple of wild wrecks to capture the Kobalt Tools 500.

Busch won the spring race at the 1.54-mile trioval for the second year in a row, beating Matt Kenseth to the line by nearly half a second. Juan Pablo Montoya was third, followed by Kasey Kahne and Paul Menard.

The race went 16 laps past its scheduled 325 because of two big crashes. The first came when Carl Edwards, running 156 laps behind, clipped Brad Keselowski and sent him flying toward the grandstands upside down. Keselowski was OK, but NASCAR ordered Edwards to park his car and summoned him to its trailer for a tongue-lashing.

On the first attempt at a green-white-checkered finish, another crash took out seven cars coming through turns three and four. Finally, they got in two clean laps, and it was Busch all the way for his third career win in Atlanta.

“Even with all the restarts, I thought we had the strongest car,” said Busch, who claimed his 21st career win and snapped Jimmie Johnson’s two-race winning streak.

Keselowski clipped Edwards early in the race, which sent him smashing into Joey Logano. Edwards spent much of the day in the garage, but returned to take out his frustration in what appeared to be an intentional tap on Keselowski coming across the start-finish line.

Keselowski’s car spun and flipped upside down, striking the barrier in front of the grandstand with a hard smash to the roof. After Edwards was ordered off the track, he drove defiantly around the quarter-mile track in front of the stands and went backward down the pit lane.

“To come back and just intentionally wreck someone, that’s not cool,” Keselowski said. “He could have killed someone in the grandstands.”

Edwards hardly issued a denial afterward.

“Brad knows the deal between him and I,” Edwards said. “The scary part was his car went airborne, which was not what I expected at all. At the end of the day, we’re out here to race and people have to have respect for one another and I have a lot of respect for people’s safety.”

Johnson, the four-time defending Sprint Cup champion, was coming off wins at California and Las Vegas. He climbed into contention again, getting as high as third, but a bad pit stop and a scrape with Ryan Newman cost Johnson a chance to become the first driver since 2007 to make it three in a row. He finished 12th.

Denny Hamlin cut a tire with 36 laps to go — one of about a dozen drivers taken out by tire problems — and Busch emerged from the pits out front.

As the race headed into its final laps, Montoya was cutting some big chunks out of Busch’s lead. Then things really got interesting.

The Edwards-Keselowski scrap with three laps to go forced the first attempt at an overtime finish. Busch came to the restart trailing a couple of drivers who took only two tires in the pits, but a brilliant move shot him right back to the front.

Busch hugged the rear bumper of Clint Bowyer’s car, then dipped to the inside and split both him and Menard heading through the first turn. Busch appeared to be pulling away, but Jamie McMurray got into Bowyer before the field could take the white flag, leading to a seven-car pileup and another try for a clean finish.

“We’ve got to win this race three times, maybe even four times,” a frustrated Busch said on his radio.

There wasn’t much drama on the next restart. Busch got away cleanly, zipped around the track two more times at more than 190 mph and took the checkered flag. He then returned to the flagstand, grabbed the symbol of his win and headed off on a victory lap in reverse.

Pole winner Dale Earnhardt Jr. lost the lead on the very first lap but was running near the front when a mysterious tire problem sent him to the pits on lap 114 under a green flag. He radioed that a tire felt loose, but the crew found it fully inflated after making the change. It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the problem, though the No. 88 team was able to rule out another problem with the axle, the issue that ruined Earnhardt’s day at California two weeks ago.

Junior returned to the track just as Hendrick Motorsports teammate Mark Martin blew a tire, which sent him spinning through the trioval grass to bring out a caution flag. The unfortunate timing cost Earnhardt dearly; he slipped a lap down and never got back in the mix, though all the trouble at the end boosted him to 15th in the final standings.

His winless streak is now 61 races. Going back farther, Earnhardt has only one win in his last 138 races.