By AMANDA VINCENT
John Hunter Nemechek led a Toyota dominance and a Kyle Busch Motorsports one-two finish in the ToyotaCare 250 at Richmond (Va.) Raceway on Saturday for his second win of the 2021 season.
“Never give up attitude. I just can’t thank Kyle (Busch, team owner), everyone at Toyota, all of our great partners,” Nemechek said. “It’s pretty cool to be able to come out here and do what we were able to do. We had a really fast truck. I’m super proud of all of my guys and thankful for them. Thankful for our partners, Safeway, ACME and all of their partners with them. I know the president is here from Safeway and ACME, so that’s pretty cool to get them a win on their own turf. Thank you for believing in me. It’s pretty cool. Taylor (wife) and Aspen (infant child) are actually here in the motorhome, so hopefully, we can get to celebrate with them. It’s been an amazing time with Aspen, so far. This puts a lot of different things in perspective, but I just can’t thank all of my guys, all of our partners, everyone enough for believing in me and giving me this opportunity. It’s two wins. #HereForWins. Let’s go get more.”
Nemechek’s Kyle Busch Motorsports boss and teammate Kyle Busch finished second. A third KBM driver, Chander Smith finished fourth after the three teammates ran one-two-three for a time late in the 250-lap race.
“Definitely not good enough in the long run; it would just overheat the tires,” Busch said. “We tried to free it up, and we got loose, and that helped us last another five laps, but as soon as I felt tight and saw the 4 (Nemechek) wiggle loose, I was like, ‘Oh, we don’t have a shot to pass him.’ We hung with him, at least. You know what the most discouraging thing about today is? KBM one-two-four with three entirely different setups, so what do we come back here with? That’s what’s most confusing now to me is the next time back, what do we do? Think the 4 was just, overall, better than us. It was fun to race up there with him and fun to race up there with the rest of the guys. I’m glad we could kind of get single-filed out at the end a little bit to where we could race amongst ourselves, but they were just better than us there.”
Tyler Ankrum finished third.
Nemechek led a race-high 114 laps after taking his first lead on lap 100 by passing Busch. Toyotas from KBM and ThorSport Racing combined to lead the entire race, with ThorSport driver and two-time 2021 race winner Ben Rhodes being the first to run up front. He led the first two laps of the race after starting on the pole.
Rhodes’ ThorSport teammate Grant Enfinger took the lead on lap three and ran up front for the remaining 70-lap opening stage for a stage-one win. Nemechek won stage two at lap 140 after Busch led the early laps of the second stage when he got off pit road first during the caution at the end of stage one..
After the first stage ran caution-free and the yellow flag waved only twice for on-track incidents during the second stage. The final 110-lap stage was caution-filled, with the yellow flag ultimately waving 11 times by the end of the race. Three of the cautions were for Jennifer Jo Cobb, who seemed to intentionally wrecked Norm Benning in a retaliatory move on lap 177. Cobb was parked by NASCAR for the incident and failing to maintain minimum speed.
Johnny Sauter rounded out the top-five in Sunday’s race. Finishing sixth through 10th were Todd Gilliland, Rhodes, Enfinger, Sam Mayer and Austin Hill.
Below, is the complete finishing order of the ToyotaCare 250:
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