- Chris Buescher scored his third career win, and the second for Roush-Fenway Keselowski Racing.
- There was only one caution for an on-track incident, three total, with two being for Stage breaks.
- Eight drivers swapped the lead 18 times, but only during pit stop cycles.
Any listing of favorites to win the Cook Out 400 at Richmond Raceway would have included the usual suspects: hometown favorite Denny Hamlin, recent Richmond winner Kyle Larson, and multi-time Richmond winners Kevin Harvick, Joey Logano, Kyle Busch, and Martin Truex Jr.
Nowhere on that list would you have found the name Chris Buescher. Especially if you knew he would be faced with a late-race restart battle with Hamlin after the only “serious” caution during the 400-lap, 300-mile race.
But Buescher held on, beating Hamlin in the three-lap shootout that didn’t include even one hint of ungentlemanly driving. Hamlin finished second by about a half-second, followed by Busch, Logano, Ryan Preece, Brad Keselowski, Truex Jr., Aric Almirola, Austin Dillon, and Harvick.
The victory was the third in Buescher’s 279-start career, his second in two seasons for RFK Racing (owners Jack Roush, the Fenway Group, and Keselowski). It makes him Playoff eligible, joining previous 2023 winners Christopher Bell, Tyler Reddick, Ross Chastain, William Byron, Ricky Stenhouse, Ryan Blaney, Larson, Busch, Hamlin, Logano, and Truex Jr.
NASCAR likely will store all evidence of this one in a “Never Show Again” drawer. Granted, eight drivers swapped the lead 18 times, but there wasn’t a single green-flag pass for the lead in the 3-hour, 2-minute race. Every lead change came either during the usual cycle of green-flag stops, the two “staged” cautions, or the last one, when Daniel Suarez and Noah Gragson spun together in Turn 4.
Combined, Keselowski and Buescher, RFK owner and teammate respectively, led 190 of the 400 laps, often without any serious challengers. Bubba Wallace, Hamlin, Truex Jr., and Reddick combined to lead all but 11 of the other 210 laps. Talk about domination: there were spells when the leader was virtually uncontested for 78, 44, 36, 52, 50, 35 and 46 laps.
Buescher, a native Texan, was in his element on the hot, steamy afternoon that saw cockpit temperatures in the 120-135ish range. “I love it when it gets hot and slick,” he said of the ¾-mile track. “I like searching for grip and having that line moving around. That made it fun.
“(Today) was just textbook execution from everybody. We had a clean day, good strategy, good pit stops, and good choices. The hot, slick weather lets us move around and chase what we need to have speed.”
And as for that late-race caution that seems to crop up almost every weekend: “I was expecting,” Buescher said, laughing. “I was prepared. I knew it was going to take some work to get back going, but our Mustang was so good firing off today. I knew that last restart was going to be tough, but I knew we had the speed in this thing.”
Hamlin said the outcome was how it should have been. “I got a God-awful restart,” he said. “Kyle (Busch) pushed me down the front straightaway, which was really helpful. I just didn’t do a good job on the restart. I didn’t do a good job into Turn 1 on the second-to-last lap. Our team gave us a shot.
“The race should have been his, anyway. The caution at the end… it was a second chance at life for us.”
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