Team Penske’s Joey Logano kept a hard-charging Kevin Harvick in his rear-view mirror throughout the closing laps Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway, winning under the lights in “Thunder Valley” for the second year in a row. Logano kept the Number-22 Ford in front over the final sixty-three trips around the Tennessee half-mile in posting his third win of the season and the eleventh of his career.
The margin of victory was twenty-two one-hundredths of a second over Harvick with pole sitter Denny Hamlin, Jimmie Johnson and Clint Bowyer completing the top five … Harvick continues to cruise through 2015 with a comfortable lead in the regular-season standings. Heading into a late-summer break in the schedule, Harvick enjoys a forty-three-point advantage over Logano. The defending Sprint Cup Series champion has twenty-one top tens in twenty-four starts this season including ten runner-up finishes, and victories at Las Vegas and Phoenix International Raceway.
Harvick has been atop the point standings since his win in Vegas way back on March 8th … Kyle Busch, a four-time winner this year, further solidified his eligibility for a post-season Chase berth with an eighth-place finish at Bristol. He now holds a forty-six-point cushion over Cole Whitt in his bid to remain among the top thirty with just two races left in the regular season. Busch led a race-high 192 laps Saturday night in his bid for a weekend sweep after winning Friday’s X-FINITY Series race.
The Sprint Cup Series will have next weekend off before returning to action Sunday, September 6th, with the Bojangles’ Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.