Tony Stewart put himself back in the hunt for the “Chase for the Sprint Cup” championship by winning Sunday’s Price Chopper 400 at Kansas Speedway.
Stewart and crew chief Darian Grubb gambled with a two-tire stop late in the race. He exited the pits first and grabbed the lead with 30 laps remaining. The two-time Cup Series champion then held off a hard-charging Jeff Gordon in the closing laps for his fourth win of the season and the 37th of his Cup career. Stewart, who also won at Kansas in 2006, joined Gordon as the only repeat winners here. MiamiHerald.com
More important, Stewart moved into fourth place in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings, just 67 points behind leader Mark Martin, who finished seventh.
“We just kind of ran our pace,” said Stewart, who also won at Kansas Speedway in 2006. “When somebody starts running you down, it’s easy to overdrive your car trying to maintain a gap, and you end up making it worse on yourself.
“So even though I saw him getting bigger in the mirror, I didn’t want to burn the tires off of it … it’s like he could get so close and then he couldn’t get any closer.”
Gordon, who won the first two Cup races at Kansas Speedway in 2001 and 2002, gave it his best shot but had to settle for second.
“As long as he didn’t make any big mistakes, I wasn’t going to catch him,” Gordon said. Kansas City Star
NASCAR Sprint Cup Series: Price Chopper 400 at Kansas- Race Results
Biffle was third, followed by Juan Pablo Montoya, Denny Hamlin, Kahne and Martin.
David Reutimann was the only non-Chase driver in the top 11 with an eighth-place finish and was followed by Johnson, Carl Edwards and Kurt Busch.
Only two Chase drivers finished outside the top 11: Newman, who was penalized for speeding off pit road midway through the race, was 22nd; and Brian Vickers finished 37th after blowing his motor.
Martin’s up 18 points over three-time defending series champion Johnson, who finished ninth after a bad pit call put him in traffic that he couldn’t overcome.
“We’ll have to get home and look at the car and see what is going on there, ” Johnson said. “So many guys took two, and we took four. There at the end, we were just trying to get some track position back and I just didn’t have the speed that I had the start of the race and had lost a couple of more spots.
“At the end of the day, we finished ninth and that isn’t too bad. We hate to see guys we are racing in points ahead of us. “
Martin wasn’t in a celebratory mood despite maintaining his lead: There were only three drivers within 100 points of him at the start of the race, now the field has seven within 103.
“Look at it however you want, ” Martin said. “What is there, seven more to go? I don’t think we should be getting all hyped up about the tally right now, you know? We’ve got a lot of racing to go. ” The Associated Press
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