Denny Hamlin Tag

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service Denied victory at Daytona by an inopportune pit call last Sunday, Kurt Busch drove like lightning in a two-lap overtime dash to the finish to win Saturday night’s Quaker State 400 at Kentucky Speedway. Swapping sheet metal with brother Kyle Busch as the siblings battled for the victory throughout the overtime, Busch collected his first victory of the season in the No. 1 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet. The 2004 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion won for the first time at Kentucky and theRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – With 42 laps remaining in Sunday’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway, dark clouds closed in on the 2.5-mile superspeedway and as it always happens when weather threatens, the intensity ratcheted up and the inevitable “Big One” struck. Austin Dillon and Clint Bowyer had hooked up in the draft to find their way to the front of the field when Bowyer ducked low from second place to try and take the lead for himself. Dillon threw an untimely blockRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Persistent rain with no letup in sight forced postponement of Saturday night’s scheduled Coke Zero Sugar 400 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Daytona International Speedway. The event has been rescheduled for Sunday at 1 p.m. ET, to be broadcast on NBC, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. Reigning series champion Joey Logano will lead the field to green at the 2.5-mile superspeedway, with Kyle Busch beside him. A lightning delay on Friday forced cancellation of Cup time trials, andRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – A lightning delay at Daytona International Speedway forced cancellation of qualifying for Saturday’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 (7:30 p.m. ET on NBC, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) because it prevented timely completion of Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series inspection before time trials. Accordingly, with the field ordered according to owner points, Joey Logano will start from the pole position in the No. 22 Team Penske Ford. Kyle Busch, who thought he would have qualified mid-pack if time trials had beenRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – NASCAR celebrated the Independence Day holiday the only way it knew how on Thursday, by taking to the track at Daytona International Speedway for Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series practice and the fireworks certainly started early. The first of two sessions were entertaining and full of action, with drivers running two and three-wide in an effort to feel out the package that makes its debut at Daytona after receiving rave reviews at Talladega a few months back. Though the typical FloridaRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Following last Sunday’s battle in the Windy City, the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series heads back to where it all began, Daytona International Speedway, for this weekend’s 60th running of the Coke Zero Sugar 400, the third superspeedway race of the season. From 1959 until 1987, the 160 lap, 400 mile shootout at the World Center of Racing, then called the Firecracker 400, was held on July 4th, even if the holiday fell in the middle of the week. Beginning inRead More

By Holly Cain, NASCAR Wire Service JOLIET, Ill. – Austin Dillon earned his third Busch Pole Award of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season Saturday evening at Chicagoland Speedway, his No. 3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet posting a speed of 176.263 mph around the 1.5-mile track. Kevin Harvick will start second, his fifth front row start of the season in the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford. Sunoco Rookie of the Year candidate, Dillon’s RCR teammate Daniel Hemric was third fastest, seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson was fourth and KurtRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor The countdown to the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs is on, with just 10 races remaining in the regular season to set the field of contenders that will fight for the championship later this fall. Kicking off the summer stretch will be Chicagoland Speedway and Sunday’s running of the Camping World 400, which returns to its mid-summer roots for the second year in a row after several years as the Playoff opener. The track, which joined the circuit in 2001, only hosts the CupRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service SONOMA, Calif. – Dominant in defense of last year’s victory in the Toyota/Save Mart 350, Martin Truex Jr. held off Kyle Busch, his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, to win Sunday’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series event at Sonoma Raceway. With three-lap fresher tires after the final set of green-flag pit stops at the 2.52-mile road course—which for the first time since 1997 featured use of the carousel connecting Turns 4 and 7—Busch closed an 8.269-second gap to slightly more than a second over theRead More