BRISTOL, Tennessee – Kyle Bush walked past the spinning cars of Tyler Reddick and Chase Briscoe to steal his first Cup win of the season on Sunday night on a slippery, wet, dirt-covered Bristol Motor Speedway.
Reddick pursued the first Cup win of his career, leading 99 of the 250 laps and overseeing the race since the last restart with 24 laps left. But the interrupted traffic allowed Briscoe to get closer to Reddick, and he determined his winning move for the third turn when Briscoe tried to slide past Reddick from the inside.
This move had the opposite effect and both cars got out of control and Bush, who was third, just ran for his first victory.
“We have one, you know?” said Bush. “It doesn’t matter how you get them, it’s all about getting them.”
Bush won the Bristol Cup for the ninth time – for the first time in two black races – and was booed by crowds of fans waiting for two rain delays, which pushed the first Easter race of 1989 to nearly four hours.
“I mean, man, I feel like Dale Earnhard Sr. right now,” Bush said, referring to the 1999 race, in which Earnhardt was booed for pushing Terry Labonte off the road to victory. “That’s great. I didn’t do anything.”
Reddick finished second and accused himself of not holding Briscoe. Briscoe went from two turns from victory to 22nd and immediately found Reddick on pit road to apologize.
“I think I would have gotten away anyway,” Briscoe said. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to let you know. I’m sorry. I wish you had won.”
Reddick showed understanding and admitted that he needed to be more protected.
“I don’t think I did everything right,” Reddick said. “Briscoe managed to drive me down there. I had to do a little better job, I just don’t know, I didn’t have to let him get that close. He drove me back. I worked very hard to do it.
“I mean, you’re racing in the dirt, you’re moving on the last turn. This is all you, as a pilot, hope to fight for in his situation. Make it really exciting for the fans. I had to do a better job and stepped back so that he was out of range to try to make that move. “
The rain stopped the race for the second time moments before the race had to turn green with 30 laps left.
“It’s slimy,” said Bush, who ran second as the rain slid down the track.
On the inside of his cockpit, Reddick knew she had to work for him if he wanted to win.
“One of the best in car racing, Kyle Bush, he will definitely make me win it,” said Reddick from inside his Chevrolet.
But Briscoe passed Bush when the rain finally stopped, and it was Briscoe who thwarted Reddick’s journey to victory.
The race was NASCAR’s second attempt to hold a Dirt Cup race and became a wet and muddy mystery when the rain stopped the race and most of the pilots seemed ignorant of the rules.
Bristol dumped more than 2,300 trucks of red clay in Tennessee on its favorite 0.533-mile concrete bullring to help NASCAR add variety to the schedule at a time when the car series is experimenting with radical change. Fox Sports then persuaded NASCAR to take the TV slot in Easter prime time, for the first time since NASCAR’s inception in 1949. The Cup Series deliberately chose the date.
NASCAR has held 10 previous Easter Cup races in its history, but all because of time-related rescheduling. This purposeful event was designed to dominate the television audience, brought together as a family, in the same way that the NFL and NBA do on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
What the new audience saw was a mass of confusion in the middle of the race, as few drivers seemed to understand the rules during the first stop. Some drivers faced opposition – probably because their teams knew the scoring had stopped under the red flag and would not resume until the race was green.
Bush was among many pilots who did not get on the pit, perhaps because they thought they would go up in working order. So Bush was the one with his car in front when NASCAR stopped all activity, but Briscoe, who had expired, was marked as the leader.
Danny Hamlin, who had already been eliminated from the race, watched Fox Sports and saw what he thought was an explanation of the rules that lasted more than a minute.
“What’s wrong with this photo,” Hamlin wrote on Twitter. “As a fan sitting on my ass right now watching, it’s hard for me to take this seriously.”
Carson Hochevar, the runner-up in Saturday’s truck series race, posted a meme hinting that NASCAR is making the rules as they go. In fact, NASCAR was clear in its pre-race rules video that the scoring will be stopped at the end of the stage and will not resume until the race turns green again.
The confusion up and down the road showed that few had a clear idea of the procedures in Bristol, which are different from all other Cup races. NASCAR held a mandatory pre-race pilot meeting before the pandemic where the rules were discussed; it has since been replaced by video.
The race resumed – with Briscoe as the leader – with the entire third stage still remaining.