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Kyle Busch Dominates Daytona NASCAR Busch Series Race

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (July 7, 2007) — Kyle Busch held off Kevin Harvick and Dave Blaney in a green-white-checkered-flag finish to win Saturday’s rain-delayed Winn-Dixie 250 NASCAR Busch Series race at Daytona International Speedway.

Busch crossed the finish line .103 seconds ahead of Harvick, with Blaney .243 seconds back, in a race that required two laps beyond the posted 100-lap distance at the 2.5-mile superspeedway. Tony Stewart and Clint Bowyer completed the top five.

Busch led 65 of the 102 laps and was at the front when Juan Pablo Montoya spun in the dogleg on Lap 98 to bring out the race’s sixth and final caution. The race restarted on Lap 101, and though Harvick and Blaney jockeyed for position behind the race winner, they never mounted a concerted threat.

The victory was Busch’s seventh in the NASCAR Busch Series and the first this season, though he had led the most laps in four previous Busch races (Daytona, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Texas).

“It was definitely a good racecar, and all we had to do was keep it out front and try to keep the mistakes to a minimum,” Busch said. “Really, there were none today. For me, it was just a matter of being able to hit my restarts right and go through the gears and not miss a shift and keep those guys at bay — keep them to half-a-car-length to a car-length behind me so they could never develop momentum and a run to get by me.”

Harvick ducked out of line momentarily on the final lap but had no drafting help, and the top four quickly returned to single file.

“We had a lot of trouble today,” said Harvick, who had problems with the left rear tire on an early pit stop and later suffered an alternator failure. “We couldn’t get the tire off, the alternator went out, and we were just really, really loose the first run and kind of had to back out of the pack there to wait to get our car fixed.

“Once we got our car tightened back up and were able to get back to where I could control the thing, we were able to make ground there and get back through the field. We put ourselves in position there at the end and got to about the rear tire and just didn’t have any pushing. We were up there by ourselves and had to duck back down and just ride around.”

Busch took the lead for the first time exiting the pits on Lap 22 with a pass in the grass, going three-wide to beat Clint Bowyer and Kyle Krisiloff to the scoring line at the end of pit road. Because Busch stayed below the pit road speed limit of 55 mph, NASCAR allowed the move, but warned the driver not to do it again.

“I was a little bit concerned about going out to the grass, but I felt it was in my best interest and the best interest of safety for everybody on pit road to go out there,” Busch explained. “If I would have went to the inside, and one of those guys turned off into their pit box with me alongside of them, we would have either gotten wrecked with them or gone off into some other guy’s pit box while there were people on pit road.

“I didn’t want to bother anything going to the inside, so I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to have go out to the grass.’ It was either that or stop. I didn’t know whether we were going to get busted for going out to the grass, because NASCAR can’t control your pit road speed if you go out to the grass, but if they look at the replays, I probably slowed down a little bit.”

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