PALMETTO STATE’S ONE, ONLY NASCAR RACE GOES TO ANNOYING 23 YEAR OLD

Unfortunately, NASCAR’s annual right-of-passage known as the Dodge Challenger 500 at Darlington Raceway didn’t go to TPS’s favorite driver Martin Truex Jr., and it totally sucked this year.

Although most of the field earned their “Darlington Stripes,” Nevada’s 23-year-old prodigy Kyle Busch captured the checkered flag to cap off an otherwise uneventful weekend.

At a track-record average speed of 140.350 mph, Busch, who led a race-high 169 laps, pulled away after a restart on Lap 308 of 367 and ran away from the rest of the field en route to his third Cup win of the year and the seventh of his career.

One week removed from last Saturday’s controversial finish at Richmond, where Busch spun Dale Earnhardt Jr. in a late-race battle for the lead, Busch finished 3.115 seconds ahead of runner-up Carl Edwards and extended his lead in the Cup standings to 79 points over second-place Jeff Burton.

Jeff Gordon was third Saturday night, followed by Earnhardt and David Ragan. Matt Kenseth, Denny Hamlin, Travis Kvapil, Dave Blaney and Burton completed the top 10.

“Luckily, the team gave me a really strong car tonight, because I like to knock the wall down,” quipped Busch, who recovered from a loose lug nut that brought him back to the pits on Lap 60 for an unplanned green-flag stop and cost him track position. “We had a really good piece tonight.” [REID SPENCER - Sporting News]

Normally I would add something humorously substantive here, but my post-race rage over the fact that Truex went from seventh to 14th in about two laps to allow a loud-mouthed Busch to win has blinded my oft-witty imagination. Sorry folks, you’ll have to check back tomorrow for that.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Around the state. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.