(NASCAR)—Kyle Busch had to fight off Kyle Larson in a wild last-lap battle to win his fifth Cup race of the year at the Chicagoland Speedway—which actually is in Joliet, Illinois, about an hour’s drive at normal speeds southwest of Chicago.
The crowd booed Busch after a slam-bang final lap, leading him to comment, “If you don’t like that kind of racing, don’t even watch.’
Here’s the highlights from NBCSN and NASCAR:
Sunrise Beach driver Clint Bowyer, who started fifth, finished there. But the laps between the green and checkered flags were an adventure. He had taken the lead before the first round of pit stops but was too fast leaving the pits and had to do a pass-through penalty, which dropped him back and fell even farther back when he was too fast on the pass-through. That brought a stop-and-go penalty but he didn’t stop, forcing a fourth visit to the pits for the stop-and-go that left him three laps behind the leaders.
Pit strategy and some breaks with caution periods let him get back on the lead lap where he ran some of the fastest laps of the race to claim fifth. Without his struggles in the pits, he said afterward, he could have contended for the win.
Joplin’s Jamie McMurray started thirteenth and spent the race running just outside the top ten, finishing twelfth. With nine races to go before the top sixteen drivers race for the championship, McMurray is 58 points behind sixteenth place in the standings.
NASCAR returns to Daytona next weekend.
(INDYCAR)—IndyCar runs its next race in Newton, Iowa, just three counties north of the Missouri border next weekend. It’s the eleventh race in the series’ seventeen-race schedule. The four Andretti Autosport drivers dominated the testing there last week with Ryan Hunter-Reay running the hottest lap—17.72 seconds on the .894 banked oval.
That’s 181.63 mph. Seven other drivers were under seventeen seconds.
All of the drivers in the series will practice at 10:15 next Saturday morning, qualify at 2:30, and get settle on their race setups in a final practice at 5:45 p.m. The green flag is scheduled to drop at 1 p.m. next Sunday.
(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen was a surprise winner of the Austrian Grand Prix as the favored Mercedes team had mechanical problems that left both of its drivers on the sidelines.
Verstappen, who drivers for Team Red Bull, finished ahead of Ferrari teammates Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel. Mercedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas had started 1-2. But Bottas dropped out after losing hydraulic pressure and Hamilton was sidelined later with no fuel pressure.
Vettel’s third-place run puts him back in the F1 points lead, one point ahead of Hamilton.
The race was one of the best for the American Haas team. Romain Grosjean, who had yet to score any points this year, came home fourth, one spot ahead of teammate Kevin Magnussen.
