A full house was treated to a warm desert evening in Avondale, Ariz. to watch Saturday evening’s Subway Fresh 500. Kyle Busch won his first pole of the 2006 season and led the field of 43 to the green flag at 5:25 P.M. local time.
Matt Kenseth and the No. 17 DEWALT team enjoyed their best starting position of the season with a qualifying effort of fourth. Though Kenseth started at the front, he did not have much luck staying there throughout the first half of the race.
The car was very “temperamental” as Kenseth described it at one point in the race. It seemed as if the crew was chasing the handling of the racecar for much of the evening. Although the car started with a tight condition, after the first adjustments it went towards the loose side of neutral.
Robbie Reiser and company made numerous adjustments to the DEWALT Fusion throughout the evening. In addition to the usual handling concerns, the team also had to contend with an ever-changing racetrack that started out in the hot sun of the desert and quickly cooled come nightfall.
By lap 53, Kenseth was running in the 15th position and in danger of falling out of the top 20. But, at the very capable hands of The Killer Bees, and the benefit of nightfall, the car eventually came around and Kenseth began working his way back to the front, slowly at first, but as the event wore on and long green-flag runs became the theme for the evening, Kenseth began to gain more and more ground.
The final caution of the evening flew on lap 222 of the 312-lap race, setting up a 90-lap, green-flag run to the checkers. Kenseth restarted sixth, but as the run grew longer the No. 17 did not fall off near as much as the cars in front of him. With 30 laps remaining in the race, Kenseth was seven seconds behind the leader, but quickly began to make up ground eventually finishing only three seconds behind the leader. Over the final 30 laps, Kenseth picked up three positions, nearly a fourth, and after a roller coaster evening, brought home a third-place finish.
The third-place finish marks the fifth top-three finish of the 2006 campaign which is now eight races old. The finish also breaks a three-race streak for Kenseth at PIR where he’s finished 32nd or worse. With the strong effort at Phoenix, Kenseth reclaimed the lead in the NEXTEL Cup Championship Point Standings, now nine points ahead of second place Jimmie Johnson. This marks the second time Kenseth has led the point standings in 2006.
“I love this racetrack,” Kenseth said immediately following the race on pit road. “I know we finished really good, but we just really struggled almost all night. That long run at the end was just what we needed. We were tight enough to be good in that long run. We almost got up to second there and I just couldn’t quite get by Tony. It was a great race at the end. It was fun slip-sliding around a little bit. I don’t know how (the start of this season) could get much better. We had a car about like we had at Martinsville, I thought, today. I thought we had an eighth-to-12th-place car, and through pit stops and good adjustments and some people having bad luck and running out of gas, we were able to get a good finish.”
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