Matt Kenseth held off a late charge from Kyle Larson on Sunday afternoon at Dover International Speedway to claim his first victory of the season, capping Toyota’s weekend sweep of all three races at “The Monster Mile.” Matt Crafton won Friday’s Camping World Truck Series race and Erik Jones followed with a victory in Saturday’s X-FINITY Series event. Kenseth led the final forty-seven laps on Sunday, nipping Larson at the checkered flag by eighteen one-hundredths of a second. It’s his thirty-seventh career victory and third at Dover. Kenseth’s last Cup Series win had come in New Hampshire last fall, twenty races ago. He started tenth on Sunday and led briefly during the first half of the race before taking control down the stretch.
The race was red-flagged for more than eleven minutes after Jimmie Johnson’s transmission failure triggered an eighteen-car accident along the frontstretch less than fifty laps from the finish. Johnson, at the front of the field on a restart, could not get his car into third gear and up to speed. Martin Truex Junior drove into the rear of Johnson’s Chevrolet and the contact sent cars spinning across the track. Attrition left just fourteen cars running on the lead lap at the finish, a season low in the Sprint Cup Series. Larson led eighty-five laps en route to his second-place finish.
Rookie Chase Elliott ran third with Kasey Kahne and Kurt Busch completing the top five. Pole sitter Kevin Harvick led a race-high 117 laps, all in the first half, before fading to fifteenth place – enough to keep him atop the regular-season point standings.
