NASCAR: Kyle Busch Wins 2019 Cup Series Championship

HOMESTEAD, Fla. — No one had any chance of catching Kyle Busch in the third stage of Sunday’s season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Shortly after the start of Stage 3, Busch took the lead from teammate Denny Hamlin and after a series of green-flag pit stops, went on to win the race and the 2019 Cup Series title.

It is the second championship of Busch’s career. He won the 2015 title by winning the same race in a season shortened by injuries. Busch suffered a serious lower leg injury in a hard crash in the season-opening Xfinity Series race. The accident caused him to miss the first 11 Cup Series races of the season, but Busch went on to win five of the 25 races he started.

Busch’s second championship also comes as he snaps a streak of 21 races without a win. While Hamlin, Kevin Harvick and Martin Truex Jr. — the three drivers he raced against for the championship — all won a race in the previous round of the playoffs, Busch’s most recent victory came on June 2 at Pocono.

After winning four of the first 14 races of the season, Busch was in a slump. Relatively speaking. He still managed 13 top-10 finishes in those 21 races, but fell short of the win, as his teammates Hamlin and Truex Jr. won eight races in that span.

Busch is now the 16th driver to win multiple Cup Series titles. The win is also the 19th of the season for Joe Gibbs Racing. It is the first time in modern NASCAR history that a multi-car team has won more than half the races in a season. JGR’s 19 wins surpasses Hendrick Motorsports’ 18 wins in 2007.

“I mean, damn, what a season Joe Gibbs Racing has put together,” Busch said. “As great as our group is, everybody in the shop, how great they are at building really, really special race cars. We’re going after them this time.”

Truex’s team chooses wrong tires

Truex had the dominant car for the first half of the race. In fact, dominant might be an understatement. He passed 27 cars in the first 80 laps of the race and headed into the start of the second stage.

But he lost the lead and never regained it when he had to pit shortly after his pit stop halfway through the second stage, because his team had put the front tires on the wrong side of the car.

“That’s never happened to me,” Truex said. “No. No. I don’t even know what to say. No. It doesn’t ride well with the left front on the right front, I can tell you that. It’s very tight.”

Truex, of course, noticed the problem right away and quickly returned to the pits, but he lost enough track time that he had to catch up during the stage.

He did that easily because his car was so fast. But he never got close to the lead after that. Truex eventually finished second, but was more than 4.5 seconds behind Busch.

“Ultimately, it was losing track position that did us in,” Truex said. “We started the third stage again in third and I really wish I could have gotten second or fourth. I got passed on the outside by (Erik Jones) and (Joey Logano) and a couple of those guys, and then I just had to roll my right front wheel out to get by them behind me and I got stuck on that run and it took me forever to get by a couple of cars.

Harvick hopes for caution, finishes fourth

After Busch was no longer in the rearview mirror during the third phase of the race, Harvick and his team decided to wait as long as possible to pit in the third phase.

With tire wear exceptionally high at Homestead, it was a decision that cost Harvick time on the track. His team was hoping for a caution. It didn’t come, as the final stage ran without a caution.

Harvick eventually finished fourth, behind Erik Jones.

“We just had to do something different,” Harvick said. “They were so much better than us long term, that was our best chance, to get a caution there at the end and we didn’t get it. We did something different, hoping to get a caution. We had to do the opposite and it just didn’t work.”

Poorly applied tape ruins Hamlin’s chances

Hamlin brought his car back to pit road in the third phase of the race after his car’s engine began spewing water. Hamlin’s team had taped the car’s grille to make a significant adjustment during his final scheduled pit stop.

But the tape was too much and the engine began to overheat. Hamlin, convinced the engine would fail if he tried to keep it on the track with 40 laps to go, pitted so his crew could remove the tape from the car.

That pit stop put him a lap down. But Hamlin’s car was fast enough after the stop that he passed Busch to regain his lap before finishing 10th, the last car on the lead lap.

Full results

1. Kyle Busch

2. Martin Truex Jr.

3. Erik Jones

4. Kevin Harvick

5. Joey Logano

6. Clint Bowyer

7. Ryan Newman

8.Austin Dillon

9. Alex Bowman

10. Denny Hamlin

11. Ryan Blaney

12. Daniel Hemric

13. Jimmie Johnson

14.Daniel Suarez

15. Chase Elliott

16. Chris Buescher

17. Paul Menard

18. Brad Keselowski

19. Ricky Stenhouse Jr.

20. Matt Di Benedetto

21. Kurt Busch

22. Aric Almirola

23. John Hunter Nemechek

24. Ty Dillon

25. Ryan Preece

26.Michael McDowell

27. David Ragan

28. Landon Cassill

29. Drawn herring

30. JJ Yeley

31. Corey LaJoie

32. BJ McLeod

33. Timmy Hill

34. Bubba Wallace

35. Ross Chastain

36. Josh Bilicki

37. Reed Sorenson

38. Joe Nemechek

39.William Byron

40. Kyle Larson

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports

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