Ben Rhodes’ Motor Blows, Kyle Busch Cruises To Victory In Toyota Tundra 250 At Kansas

by May 13, 2017 0 comments

KANSAS CITY, Kan. – After Ben Rhodes blew an engine in the closing laps, Kyle Busch cruised to victory in Friday night’s Toyota Tundra 250 at Kansas Speedway.

With just seven laps to go, Rhodes’ ThorSport Racing No. 27 Safelite Auto Glass Toyota Tundra went up in smoke after a piece of debris impacted the radiator. Rhodes was the leader at the time, and he was looking to capture his first career NASCAR Camping World Truck Series victory. Once Rhodes was out of the picture, Busch went on to win his 47th career series race.

“We ran with the best of the best,” Rhodes said.  “I was learning from Busch all night long. He’s got more wins than I have in total stock car starts. It’s just crazy because something always goes wrong with our team. We do everything right, we just can never pull one off.”

Busch started 10th, and throughout the night, he led a race high of 91 laps. The win marked the second time that the driver of the Kyle Busch Motorsports No. 51 Cessna Toyota Tundra has visited Victory Lane at Kansas Speedway. Busch led the final eight laps en route to the victory in only his second start of the season on Friday night.

“Thanks, you know this was a great win for us, but really it’s a terrible loss for Ben Rhodes,” Busch said. “He had this race won. I was trying everything I could to catch him and run him back down. I could gain a little bit on him and then I’d lose a little bit on him and just kind of went back and forth a little bit. That’s a Rowdy Manufacturing chassis and a KBM body on the 27 truck so we knew it was going to be tough to beat and it was fast and he was one of the guys we had to race with all night long. He did a phenomenal job. It’s a tough one to lose that way, I know, because I’ve lost them that way as well. But for him to be racing against us and to be doing an awesome job, man, he raced me clean. He did a great job.”

For the third race in a row, Johnny Sauter crossed the finish line in second. John Hunter Nemechek and pole-sitter Christopher Bell completed the top-five.

“We weren’t quite good enough as soon as Kyle (Busch) got around us there at the beginning of the race,” Bell said. “We just kind of were stalled there. We couldn’t make enough speed there to get back by him. Obviously we kind of got caught behind the eight ball there with pit strategy whenever we tried to short pit. We still got back up to fourth which is kind of where we had been running. We were definitely better than the trucks in front of us, but we just weren’t quite where we needed to be.”

Rounding out the top-10 was Chase Briscoe, Ryan Truex, Brett Moffitt, Kaz Grala, Justin Haley and Austin Cindric.

There were 11 cautions throughout the 167-lap race. Only two of the cautions involved multiple trucks. On lap 12, Cody Coughlin, Chase Briscoe and Grant Enfinger brought out the caution, and on lap 17, the caution came out when Stewart Friesen and Jordan Anderson crashed.

The next time that the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series are in action will be the North Carolina Education Lottery 200 at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Friday, May 19. Live broadcast will be found on FOX Sports 1 (FS1) and the Motor Racing Network (MRN) at 8:30 p.m. ET.

Photo Credit:  Chris Trotman/Getty Images

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