Race Day: The 5-Hour Energy 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway

“You’re insane”.

“We shot to pit road and got it changed there, and evidently it was oil on the race track that just made the vehicle slip so bad from out from under me”.

A mid-summer of success may have once signaled a championship run in the Sprint Cup series, but the elimination-style format of the new Chase makes lightning – like the kind crackling around the speedway Sunday – hard to bottle.

With Kyle Busch picking up another win, here are the updated points standings after New Hampshire.

Cole Whitt is 31st and Brett Moffitt 32nd, easy pickings for Busch.

“The last 20 laps felt like an hour and a half just knowing how important this was to me, to the team, to Honda”, he said.

For all the doubters and skepticism by some who feel he shouldn’t be allowed to even have a chance after missing the early portion of the season, Busch is doing the right thing by winning races and silencing the critics.

Gordon qualified 23rd for Sundays race and is still looking for his first win in what is his final, full season. It was the second time Busch won a Sprint Cup race at New Hampshire. It hardly mattered to the drivers who raved about the product.

“I never would have guessed it”, Busch said.

Stucker also said Goodyear will stick with the tires selected following a tire test in April at Indianapolis Motor Speedway for next weekend’s race at the Brickyard.

“For me, being in pro sports, I think that’s why we love it”, Gibbs said.

“I don’t know if it’s a horsepower thing, or whatever”, Larson said.

Carl Edwards is not one of those 14 winners in Sunday’s race, but he will have the best seat in the house when it starts, leading the field to green from the pole.

The win is the third in four races by Kyle Busch, who also won at Sonoma in June and Kentucky last Saturday. Busch won and Hamlin-Edwards-Kenseth went 3-4-5. “He started to run us back down”, Busch said. “But I learned that, when you are on the bottom of the ocean for 80 years and you are dragged up to the surface, you are not all that happy. With 11 races remaining before the Chase, the challenge of winning and moving into the top 30 in the point standings seemed unlikely.

At Kentucky last week, Brad Keselowski had one of the best cars but the team had a miscommunication on a pit stop that cost them several laps that knocked them out of contention. The full course caution came out a few seconds later, and with all of the other cars on the lead lap stopping for the final time of the race, Busch inherited the lead.

Second, Busch got back on the lead lap with a gutsy pass of race leader Kevin Harvick and second-place Brad Keselowski, weaving through traffic on the frontstretch seconds before NASCAR called a caution for fluid on the track on Lap 251 of 301.

As for Kyle Busch, all the proof anyone needed that he was all in, was his Kamikaze move on lap 247 to get back on the lead lap just before the final caution of the race caution came out.

As he fights for a berth in NASCAR’s Chase for the Sprint Cup playoff, Busch is balancing his aggressive nature with a smart, steady approach. We all certainly didnt budget for different aero packages in the beginning of the year and now weve got to rework our budgets in order to fit that in.

Busch was joined by son Brexton, born in late May, in victory lane wearing a No. 18 outfit. Afterward, the smoldering, pouting Busch reappeared – his version of older brother Kurt Busch’s rants – and he refused to speak to the media.