Three quarters of the way through Saturday night’s Sharpie 500 NASCAR Nextel Cup race at newly repaved Bristol Motor Speedway, Carl Edwards found a place he liked—the lead—and decided to stay there.
Edwards took the point for good on Lap 371, beating Kasey Kahne out of the pits under a caution for David Ragan’s spin in Turn 4. That’s the way the top two cars ran the rest of the way, as Edwards was as dominant in the late stages of the race as Kahne had been in the early going.
With the victory, Edwards clinched a berth in the Chase for the NASCAR Nextel Cup.
Kahne led 305 laps before Edwards claimed the point for the final time, but Edwards led the final 130 laps to claim his second victory of the season and his first in the Car of Tomorrow. Edwards beat Kahne to the finish line by 1.405 seconds to win the sixth race of his Cup career and the first for Ford with the COT.
Clint Bowyer ran third, followed by Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Kurt Busch, Ryan Newman, Bobby Labonte, Kyle Busch and Greg Biffle completed the top 10.
Ricky Rudd’s spin in Turn 1 brought out the eighth caution of the race on Lap 451. The cars of Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth, David Gilliland and Juan Pablo Montoya suffered varying degrees of damage in the ensuing wreck. The crash knocked Kenseth out of the race, but the Roush Fenway driver nevertheless clinched a berth in the Chase with his 39th-place finish.
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