Kenseth begins Chase with first DNF

Kenseth had raced consistently in the top-twelve before an accident on lap 228 took him out of the race when Sam Hornish Jr got loose while running on the apron, making contact with Chad McCumbee, who then got into Kenseth sending him against the wall at turn four.

David Gilliland then hit Kenseth's stationary car on the driver's side, while Brian Vickers and Casey Mears were also involved in the multi-car wreck, which forced the red flag to wave for ten minutes while officials cleaned the track.

"That was a couple of hard hits there, the hardest I've hit in a while," said a shaken Kenseth. "That's not the way we wanted to go out with our car. All of the guys were doing a really good job. We had good pit stops, good strategy, good adjustments today.

"We didn't have much to work with. We were really slow today and overnight they made the car a lot better. We weren't going to be a factor to win, but we were going to get a decent finish out of it anyway and try to go onto next week.

"This isn't the time to have it happen, but those things happen."

The Roush Fenway driver says his team needs to be running better in order to avoid getting involved in incidents like today's. While Kenseth was crashing in the mid-pack, his teammate Greg Biffle and Carl Edwards were fighting up front for victory.

"If we can get our cars better and run up front, most of the time things like this won't happen," he added. "If we would have been up running where Greg and Carl were running, we wouldn't have got wrecked to start with, so I always feel it's partially your fault.

"Even though we got caught up in somebody else's mess, if we would have been running better, we would have been ahead of their mess."

Kenseth lies twelfth in the Chase, a massive 177 points behind his teammate Carl Edwards.