MARTINSVILLE, Va. – He may not want to compare his own NASCAR wins mark to that of Richard Petty’s, but Kyle Busch still wrote a new page of history on Saturday at Martinsville Speedway.
Busch steamrolled to his 201st NASCAR national series victory in the TruNorth Global 250, leading a race-high 174 laps – including the final 66 – en route to the record-setting score.
By winning the race, Busch bypassed seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Petty for the most combined wins across NASCAR’s three national series. All 200 of Petty’s wins came in the Cup Series.
Busch, who is also the all-time NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series wins leader, took the lead for the final time by passing Ross Chastain with 66 laps left, going on to his 54th career Truck Series victory.
His decisive moment came during the race’s final restart with three to go, when he held off Ben Rhodes and then drove on to victory by .563 of a second.
“Today was a case of being patient,” noted Busch, who fell back as far as fourth in the middle stages of Saturday’s race. “Obviously, trying to go 150 laps to the end of the race on one set of tires is a long way to go, so we just kind of wanted to bide our time and take it easy, make sure we didn’t push too hard. We didn’t need to go up there and get any stage points or anything like that, so the opportunity for us to just kind of ride was given to us.
“We knew the 52 (Stewart Friesen) was going to pit, so I kind of let the 99 (Ben Rhodes) go and was riding in fourth and going to inherit third on a restart,” Busch added. “All of the battling ended up ensuing there anyways. What an awesome day, though. These guys gave me a great Cessna Beechcraft Tundra. It was awesome to drive. … It’s cool to win at Martinsville and cool to get to take home a clock.”
The race officially ended under caution after Reid Wilson spun in turn two on the white-flag lap.
Though Saturday’s 250-lap jaunt featured six other cautions as well, it was largely clean for the most part, seeing Busch and Chastain split the first two stage wins before dueling for much of the final stage.
The three-lap sprint to the finish was sparked by a spinning Tyler Dippel with eight laps left, at which point Rhodes saw an opportunity to pounce and challenge Busch for the victory.
However, Rhodes said after the race that he “just didn’t have enough” to contend with Busch in the end.
“Honestly, I wasn’t even thinking about trying to get to his bumper and move him or wreck him after that last restart,” Rhodes admitted. “Would I have? Probably, but was I thinking about it? No, because he had raced me with so much respect and the guys behind me had a track history of hitting me really hard. They almost wrecked me a few times, so I was more worried about not getting wrecked there.
“Coming to the white flag, I tried to focus on getting to him, but there wasn’t enough time … and I’m not even sure that with all the time in the world I could have done anything with him.”
Defending Truck Series champion Brett Moffitt completed the podium, followed by Chastain, who led the second-most laps (53) on the day but faded to fourth at the checkered flag.
Polesitter Stewart Friesen was fifth ahead of Myatt Snider, Grant Enfinger, Matt Crafton, Johnny Sauter and Bubba Wallace.
To view complete race results, advance to the next page.