RICHMOND, Va. — Chris Buescher pulled away on a restart with three laps to go and won Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series event at Richmond Raceway, snagging one of the final spots still available in the playoff field as the regular season zooms toward its conclusion.
Buescher led 88 laps and was ahead by nearly six seconds when a caution came out with less than 10 laps to go. That erased his lead over Virginia native Denny Hamlin, who was booed by his hometown crowd before the race, but Hamlin got a poor final restart and Buescher easily pulled away for his first Cup Series win of the season and third of his career.
“I knew that last restart was going to be tough, but I knew we had the speed in this thing,” said Buescher, a 30-year-old Texas native who won at Pennsylvania’s Pocoono Raceway as a rookie in 2016 for Front Row Motorsports and at Tennessee’s Bristol Motor Speedway last September during his inaugural season for RFK Racing.
Buescher and 2012 Cup Series champion Brad Keselowski, his teammate and RFK’s co-owner, led a combined 190 of the 400 laps in their Fords. Keselowski was up front for 102 laps on the 0.75-mile oval and wound up sixth.
Buescher started 26th and had to drive through most of the 36-car field for the win that locked him into the 16-driver playoff field with four races remaining in the regular season. Buescher became the 13th points race winner this year, and there are three playoff spots up for grabs over the next month.