BRISTOL, Tenn. — Kyle Busch slipped past the spinning cars of Tyler Reddick and Chase Briscoe to steal his first Cup win of the season Sunday night on slick, wet, dirt-covered Bristol Motor Speedway.
Reddick, chasing the first Cup win of his career, led 99 of the 250 laps and controlled the race from the final restart with 24 laps remaining. But lapped traffic allowed Briscoe to close in on Reddick and he timed his move for the win for the third turn, when Briscoe tried to slide his way past Reddick on the inside.
The move backfired and both cars spun out of control. Busch, who was running third, simply skirted through for the win.
“We got one, you know?” Busch said. “It doesn’t matter how you get them, it’s all about getting them.”
Busch won for the ninth time in the Cup Series at Bristol – the first time in two dirt races – and was booed by the smattering of fans who waited out two rain delays that pushed the first race on Easter Sunday since 1989 to nearly four hours.
Reddick finished second and faulted himself for not holding off Briscoe. Briscoe went from two turns away from the win to 22nd and immediately found Reddick on pit road to apologize.
“I’m sorry, I just wanted to let you know,” Briscoe said.
Rain stopped the race for a second time moments before the race was supposed to go green with 30 laps remaining.
“It’s slimy,” said Busch, who was running second at the time.
From inside his cockpit, Reddick knew he had his work cut out.
“One of the best in stock car racing, Kyle Busch, he’s definitely going to make me earn it,” Reddick said from inside his Chevrolet.
But Briscoe pulled away from Busch when the rain finally stopped, only to have Briscoe wreck Reddick’s trip to Victory Lane.
The race was NASCAR’s second attempt at running a Cup race on dirt and it turned into a wet and muddy mystery when rain paused the racing and most of the drivers seemed clueless about the rules.
Bristol dumped more than 2,300 truckloads of Tennessee red clay onto its beloved concrete 0.533-mile bullring to help NASCAR add variety to the schedule at a time when the stock car series is experimenting with radical changes. Fox Sports then convinced NASCAR to take the prime-time television slot on Easter Sunday, the first time since NASCAR’s 1949 inception the Cup Series deliberately chose the date.
NASCAR had held 10 previous Cup races on Easter Sunday, but all because of weather-related rescheduling. This purposeful event was designed to dominate a television audience gathered together as a family the same way the NFL and NBA do on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
What the new audience saw was a midrace mass of confusion because few drivers seemed to understand the rules during the first stoppage. Some drivers pitted – presumably because their teams knew scoring was halted under the red flag and wouldn’t resume until the race went green.
Busch was among many drivers who did not pit – perhaps because they assumed they’d move up in the running order. So it was Busch who had his car out front when NASCAR halted all activity, but Briscoe, who had pitted, was scored as the leader.
Denny Hamlin, who had already been eliminated from the race, was watching on Fox Sports and saw what he claimed was a rules explanation that lasted longer than a minute.
“What’s wrong with this picture,” Hamlin wrote on Twitter. “As a fan sitting on my ass right now watching, it’s hard to take this seriously.”
Carson Hocevar, the runner-up in Saturday night’s Truck Series race, posted a meme that intimated NASCAR was making up the rules as it went along. In actuality, NASCAR was clear in its prerace rules video that scoring would be stopped at the end of the stage and not resume until the race went green again.
The confusion up and down pit road indicated few had a clear grasp of the procedures, which at Bristol differed from all other Cup races. NASCAR held a mandatory prerace driver meeting prior to the pandemic in which rules were discussed; it has since been replaced by a video.
The race did resume – with Briscoe as the leader – with the entire third stage still remaining.
DALE JR. TO THE FOX BOOTH
NASCAR Hall of Famer and NBC Sports analyst Dale Earnhardt Jr. will be the rotating guest in the Fox Sports booth next Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway.
Earnhardt will join Mike Joy and Clint Bowyer on Sunday. He has a record six wins at Talladega and is the 15-time winner of NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver award.
“Calling a race from Talladega is an incredibly fun experience,” Earnhardt said in a statement issued by Fox Sports. “You absolutely have to be on your toes at all times. It doesn’t take much for all hell to break loose.”
Fox Sports and NBC Sports split NASCAR’s 38-race schedule. Neither network had an explanation for the sharing next week of Earnhardt. Fox Sports all season has used a different guest analyst as the replacement for Jeff Gordon, who returned to a competition role at Hendrick Motorsports this season and left the network with a two-man booth.
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