Kenseth starts first, finishes first

From day one of the NASCAR August race weekend at Michigan International Speedway (MIS) Matt Kenseth was leaps and bounds ahead of the other contenders. He took the FireKeepers Casino Hotel pole position with a lap of 197.488 miles per hour on Friday, Aug. 14, and dominated the following Sunday’s Pure Michigan 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup race and placed first.It was Kenseth’s third pole of the season and his first at MIS in 33 attempts. His previous best Michigan start was second in August of 2011.Kenseth and his yellow No. 20 Toyota remained just as fast in the Pure Michigan 400. He led 146 of 200 laps and crossed the finish line 1.722 seconds ahead of Kevin Harvick who placed second in his No. 4 Chevrolet.Martin Truex Jr., finished third in his No. 78 Chevrolet.The next top lap leader was Austin Dillon in his No. 3 Chevrolet with 19 laps led. He placed fourth in the race. “He [Kenseth] was pretty solid,” Dillon said. “I got the lead twice on him. It would have been hard to keep out in front of him. He had a really strong car.”Kenseth feels he’s never had a more dominating performance. “It’s been a great week, we’ve had a great couple of months, we definitely got some momentum built and the guys gave us a rocket today, but they’ve given us rockets for the last couple of months and we’re just going to work hard to keep it going,” Kenseth said.Joe Gibbs racing has won five out the last six races with Kenseth’s victory. It was his third win at MIS in 33 career starts and his 34th career Sprint Cup victory.Harvick remained the NASCAR Sprint Cup point leader. Despite running out of fuel with 88 laps remaining he fought back and retained his first place points advantage, leading Joey Logano by 48 points. Kenseth is seventh in the point standings.“The No. 20 [Kenseth] was the class of the field today,” said Harvick. “We didn’t lose a lap with all of those problems and were able to have a good enough handling car to drive back up through there and everything was good. I didn’t have anything for the No. 20, but for everything that we overcame, it was still a good day.”Kenseth was solid all day on the race’s eight caution flag restarts. The last yellow flag dropped when Jimmie Johnson spun out with just 16 laps remaining. Three laps later when the green flag waved Kenseth and Harvick started side-by-side on the front row, but Kenseth quickly took control of the situation and pulled away in the lead.“Denny [Hamlin] did a great job of pushing me from the restart zone on that last restart, but turn two was like a superspeedway race. Those Chevys were really locked up, but Denny gave me a good enough push to get by,” said Kenseth. “Honestly, the toughest restart was with the No. 3 [Austin Dillon]. We went back and forth a few times and made some contact up there. It was tough to get away from him. It was just pretty tough.”Rounding out the top 10 finishers were Denny Hamlin, fifth, Carl Edwards, sixth, Joey Logano, seventh, Ryan Newman, eighth, Brad Keselowski, ninth and Dale Earnhardt Jr., 10th.