High side is the right side

Burton edges Busch for victory

DAVID POOLE, dpoole@charlotteobserver.com

Saturday, Mar. 10, 2007

• Saturday's Las Vegas 300 results

Jeff Burton lost the lead to hometown favorite Kyle Busch after a restart with six laps to go, but fought back and passed Busch off the final turn to win Saturday’s Sam’s Town 300 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Burton went high off Turn 4 and Busch moved his Chevrolet up high to try to throw a block. Burton kept coming, though, and pulled alongside the Las Vegas native.

As Burton inched ahead in the drag race to the checkered flag, the two cars made contact and Busch spun around as the top two crossed the finish line.

“He passed me, I was going wide open and he just turned left and went by me,” Burton said of Busch’s move on the restart on Lap 194 in a caution-filled contest. “I had a game plan and did exactly what I wanted to do, but I came off Turn 2 in second. I was like, ‘Gosh, what are we going to do now?”

Busch, who led 81 of the 200 laps and at one point was battling his older brother, Kurt, for the lead, knew it was going to be tough to hold on.

“I was just too tight,” Kyle Busch said after climbing out of his mangled car and walking to the garage. Burton turned his car down pit road and pulled alongside the runner-up to check on him.

“I couldn’t hold him off,” Busch said. “He beat me fair and square. I went up to try and block him and I just didn’t get high enough to squeeze him into the fence.”

Burton had passed Busch just before the red flag, brought out when Kasey Kahne and Reed Sorenson were involved in a wreck on Lap 190 that brought out the last of a track-record 12 yellow flags.

Burton said his tires cooled down during an 11-minute red flag delay and he nearly got into the wall he slipped high following the restart while Busch went by. But Burton rallied and closed in rapidly in the final laps.

“I was getting tight, that’s the reason he passed me in the first place,” Busch said. “I was all over the place trying to figure out how to keep the lead. I started drifting up the hill and trying to squeeze him into the gray stuff. I guess I didn’t do it quick enough.”

Burton, who was a car length behind at the white flag, agreed.

“He tried to get me slowed down, but I just had so much momentum he just couldn’t stop me,” he said.

Tony Stewart battled past Kurt Busch for third place despite having an engine that was badly overheating in the middle of the race. Stewart said he was amazed the engine recovered after his team pulled tape off the grille. But he was even more incredulous about the changes that have been made to this 1.5-mile track.

“If you don’t change the track, Goodyear doesn’t have to bring a different tire,” Stewart said. The banking in the track’s turns has been increased from 12 to 20 degrees, increasing speeds to a point that Goodyear brought a much harder tire for the races here that some drivers say don’t provide enough grip for them to compete.

“It’s frustrating that (track owners) don’t have the knowledge and common sense to know how the changes they make will effect everybody. How many cars did we wreck today? If I were the car owners, I would send my bills to the track. They are the ones who start the chain of events that has made it miserable for all of us in the cars. We have no grip out there. It was not fun.”

Stewart equated the situation here to what has happened at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Charlotte the past two years after that track was first ground smooth and then repaved. The tires used here, as well as smaller 13-gallon fuel cells, were employed at Charlotte last year to try to prevent tire failures.

“It’s the same situation as Charlotte,” Stewart said. “It’s a domino effect. Phase one was changing the track and the phase two was tire trouble. Didn’t they learn anything?”

David Stremme finished fifth and Carl Edwards was sixth. Edwards leads the Busch Series standings by 68 points over Denny Hamlin.

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