Michigan: Kenseth sees red but wins

Kenseth had taken the lead from Jimmie Johnson when the latter made a final green-flag fuel stop on Lap 186, with Kenseth pitting five laps later. After the red due to Elliot Sadler's spin with 11 laps to go, which on the face of it hardly appeared to require such a reaction by the NASCAR officials, the pits were opened and all teams faced decision time. For the first five - Kenseth, Johnson, Ryan Newman, Ricky Rudd and Kurt Busch - stayed out and held position.

For the remaining nine on the lead lap, the decision was equally a no-brainer - pit for tyres and attack in what was left of the race.

The restart came with three laps to go. What saved Kenseth was a bottleneck on the restart created by a battle between rookies Johnson and Newman, which held up the chase and allowed Kenseth some breathing space. Once that was resolved, however, Pocono winner Dale Jarrett knifed to the front from 11th, passing Newman for second with a lap-and-a-half to go. He crowded Kenseth to the finish line, just missing out by 0.181secs for his second win in a row.

Kenseth admitted he expected to be beaten: "When the 12 [Newman] got behind me and I came off Turn 2 at the white flag, I thought I had lost the race. I got in the gas too early, and I got pushing really bad. I actually had to breathe the throttle a little bit, and usually when you do that you're done because they'll go by you down the straightaway.

"I looked back expecting the 12 to be underneath me, and he did the same thing. He must have got pushing there or something too and had to get out of the gas, so I was quite a bit ahead of him and I was really surprised. Then I looked back a second later and the 88 [Jarrett] was all the way alongside of him and he was coming. He must have gotten through there the way you're supposed to get through there, so he closed in real fast."