Bowyer lands surprise Richmond win

Bowyer picked up the pieces from an incident in front of him between Dale Earnhardt Jr and Kyle Busch with only three laps remaining.

The Richard Childress driver grabbed the lead and drove his car to Victory Lane for the first time this season following a green-white-chequered finish.

"They were just racing so hard that you knew it was going to happen," said Bowyer. "Just took advantage of their misfortune right there. We were fast all day long but I messed up in qualifying and got us starting in the back but we were able to bounce back and it feels pretty good."

Busch finished second despite the incident with Earnhardt, also holding off a charging Mark Martin in the last two laps. The Gibbs driver was on the inside of the No. 88 Chevrolet entering turn three, trying to take the lead away from him when the pair made contact sending Earnhardt into a spin and into the wall.

"Well it was a tough battle there, we were racing each other pretty hard there," said Busch, who has regained the lead of the championship. "His car took off up the racetrack there at the start of that last couple of laps and started running the top side and I got my car there on the bottom, getting loose down there.

"But it's just a product of good hard racing into turn three and I apologize to those guys that the whole incident happened. I didn't mean to do it on purpose obviously. It was just something that two cars got together and unfortunately it was Dale Earnhardt Jr."

Martin finished a solid third, ahead of Tony Stewart who had a good result despite hitting one of his mechanics and then Reed Sorenson's car in the pits, also surviving alternator problems for most of the distance. Martin Truex Jr rounded up the top five and a great day for DEI.

Dale Earnhardt Jr looked like closing in on his first win of the season - and also the first in nearly two years and 71 races - but the incident with Busch left him pondering what might have been. He was clearly devestated by losing a win that was within reach after so much time.

"I'm pretty disappointed to say the least," Earnhardt said after finishing 15th. "We had a good race all night and had a good top-three car and I just don't like it. The biggest disappointment is not getting what you know you can get.

"Me and Kyle got together down there. Not sure about how that happened or why that happened but it's definitely unfortunate for us."

However there couldn't be anyone more disappointed on Saturday night at Richmond than local hero Denny Hamlin. He was the class of the field and led all but one lap from pole until a right front flat tyre caused him to slow down and hand the lead over to Earnhardt with only 18 laps remaining.

"It's tough to say, I mean, you can't whine about it. It wasn't meant to be," Hamlin said. "I was just out there riding and I knew right away I went in one corner and it fell down in the right front, and I knew we had a tyre going down.

"They said the tyres looked good, but I knew that we had an issue and it just kept getting worse and worse. There's nothing we could do there. Hopefully, it was going to last to the end and it didn't."

The day turned out to be a tough one for some of the series' top names. Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth, Jeff Burton, Carl Edwards and Kurt Busch were five of eleven cars involved in a multi-car wreck at the end of the backstretch, ignited by contact between Dave Blaney and JJ Yeley.

Patrick Carpentier took the worst part of it, smashing his car hard against the inside barrier and then being hit by several cars, to end his day on the spot on lap 230. It took track officials around 21 minutes to clean the track to resume racing.

"It was a pinball ride. I mean, down the backstretch I saw the crash happening," said Carpentier. "I was trying to go to the inside to avoid it, slowing down and I think I got hit from behind, spun around and then hit the inside rail almost accelerated back to corner three and got into the cars and everybody got into me. It was a pretty hard hit."

Jeff Burton still managed an eleventh place finish after being involved in the 'big one', but slid down to second in the standing followed by Dale Earnhardt Jr and Clint Bowyer.

Pos  Driver                Car        Laps
 1.  Clint Bowyer          Chevrolet   410
 2.  Kyle Busch            Toyota      410
 3.  Mark Martin           Chevrolet   410
 4.  Tony Stewart          Toyota      410
 5.  Martin Truex Jr       Chevrolet   410
 6.  Ryan Newman           Dodge       410
 7.  Carl Edwards          Ford        410
 8.  Kevin Harvick         Chevrolet   410
 9.  Jeff Gordon           Chevrolet   410
10.  Kasey Kahne           Dodge       410
11.  Jeff Burton           Chevrolet   410
12.  Reed Sorenson         Dodge       410
13.  Bobby Labonte         Dodge       410
14.  Greg Biffle           Ford        410
15.  Dale Earnhardt Jr     Chevrolet   410
16.  Travis Kvapil         Ford        410
17.  David Ragan           Ford        409
18.  Dave Blaney           Toyota      408
19.  Scott Riggs           Chevrolet   408
20.  Elliott Sadler        Dodge       408
21.  Regan Smith           Chevrolet   408
22.  David Reutimann       Toyota      407
23.  Sam Hornish Jr        Dodge       407
24.  Denny Hamlin          Toyota      407
25.  Sterling Marlin       Chevrolet   407
26.  Robby Gordon          Dodge       406
27.  Kyle Petty            Dodge       406
28.  Brian Vickers         Toyota      406
29.  Joe Nemechek          Chevrolet   406
30.  Jimmie Johnson        Chevrolet   400
31.  Paul Menard           Chevrolet   397
32.  Juan Montoya          Dodge       389
33.  Johnny Sauter         Chevrolet   374
34.  J.J. Yeley            Toyota      365
35.  Jamie McMurray        Ford        364
36.  Casey Mears           Chevrolet   354
37.  Michael Waltrip       Toyota      352
38.  Matt Kenseth          Ford        345
39.  A.J. Allmendinger     Toyota      259
40.  Michael McDowell      Toyota      258
41.  David Gilliland       Ford        229
42.  Kurt Busch            Dodge       229
43.  Patrick Carpentier    Dodge       228