Joey Logano won a late battle with Kyle Busch and took Saturday’s Nashville 300 Nationwide Series auto race at Lebanon, Tenn.
Logano passed Busch for the lead with 10 laps to go and avoided a crash involving Joe Nemechek and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. to win the race at the Nashville Superspeedway, 0.487 seconds ahead of Busch, his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate.
Nemechek’s Chevy was sent barrel-rolling down the front straightaway. When the car finally landed on four wheels, he was still driving it, still on the throttle, and steering the car away from the outside wall, preventing more damage.
Nemechek drove it around the track and back to his pit stall. But the damage was too severe to continue, so he cranked it up and made the hard left-hand turn into to the garage, where he climbed out and surveyed his battered mount while the rest of the field ran the final five laps with Joey Logano taking the win.
Wearing a plain black firesuit and sipping on a bottle of water, Nemechek looked over and under his wrinkled car, mentally sorting the usable spare parts from the scrap iron.
Friends and crew members from other teams stopped by to commiserate. But that didn’t change the bottom line.
“It’s just terrible,” Nemechek said. “It was a brand new car and it’s killed.”
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