Matt Kenseth Snaps Winless Streak With Dover Victory

Matt Kenseth celebrates his first win of 2016

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Sunday's final laps in the AAA 400 at Dover International Raceway were a battle between the veteran and the young guns, and in the end, it was the wily veteran Matt Kenseth holding on to put himself back in Victory Lane.

Kenseth led the final 47 laps of the 400-lap event and held off a furious late-race charge from Kyle Larson and rookie Chase Elliott to secure his first victory of the season and snap a 19-race winless streak.

Kasey Kahne came home fourth, followed by Kurt Busch.

Kenseth's victory was his first since winning at last September and was his third win at Dover, where he made his first-career series start driving in relief for Bill Elliott in September of 1998.

"It feels good to be here, been a tough few months, for sure. These guys did a great job, did a great job on pit road today," said Kenseth. "It feels good to be in victory lane. It always feels good to win. Dover has always been my favorite track. I made my first Cup start here many moons ago. We only got a couple of these things. It feels good to get one and I feel like this is usually one of my better places and it's been a little bit of a struggle lately. It feels good to be here, for sure."

[adinserter name="GOOGLE AD"] The win was a bit of redemption for Kenseth, who was the only one among the four Joe Gibbs Racing cars to not score a victory in 2016. Since the start of the season, Kenseth had scored up just a single top five finish – a fourth last weekend at Kansas – and had plummeted as low as 22^nd in the points.

None of that matters now, as Kenseth finally has a victory in his pocket and an automatic spot in the field for the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

"It was one of those days where everything lined up for us at the end of the race," said Kenseth. "We were the only one left out there with two, we got those couple short runs to kind of cycle everybody else's tires, give us a lot of caution laps to get our tires cooled down.

"It all worked out for us, kind of the opposite as I feel like it's been going the last couple months. We've had really fast racecars. We've been in position to win a lot. This wasn't our fastest car by any means. But we were able to be there at the end of the race and pull it off."

The "Monster Mile" certainly lived up to its name in Sunday with 12 caution flags flying over the course of the race including a monstrous crash with 44 laps to go that took out many of the top contenders and set the stage for Kenseth's final run the finish.

Kenseth, who had gotten up front thanks to a two-tire stop during the previous caution flag, had restarted on the outside of Jimmie Johnson and was able to avoid the melee as Johnson wasn't able to get up to speed on the restart, causing Martin Truex, Jr. and Kevin Harvick to pile in and touching off a huge crash that looked more like the "Big One" at Talladega.

In all, 18 cars were involved in the crash, including Joey Logano, Greg Biffle and Denny Hamlin – all of whom had led laps during the day.

After cleaning up the carnage, the race restarted with Kenseth out in front alongside Carl Edwards with Larson and Busch following, but less than a lap later Larson got into the left rear of Edwards sending the no. 19 Toyota hard into the inside wall.

[adinserter name="GOOGLE AD"] The field lined up again for a restart with 35 laps to go with Larson now running second behind Kenseth, followed by Kurt Busch, Kasey Kahne and Elliott

Back under green, Kenseth again found himself under attack from Larson, who dogged Kenseth for the next 15 laps, at one point pulling even with Kenseth on the side before the leader was able to power back out ahead.

With 20 laps to go, Elliott finally reeled in Larson and powered past to take second, but Larson fought back and regained the spot with 17 to go.

The battle between Larson and Elliott bought precious time for Kenseth who opened up a half-second gap over Larson, who once again started to chase down the leader.

Coming to four laps to go, Larson was one again on Kenseth's bumper and tried to bump-and-run maneuver, but Kenseth was able to fight him off and pulled ahead just enough to hold on for the final three lap to win by three car-lengths over Larson.

Kyle Larson collected his second top-five finish of the season

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Larson's second-place finish was just his second top five of the season but his second straight at Dover, where he finished third at this same race last year.

"We were really good. We were better than Matt (Kenseth) there," said Larson. "A lot of good cars got wrecked which was nice and I knew I was going to be the car to probably beat. I could see Matt was pretty loose in front of me. I was just waiting for him to make a mistake and he did make a couple of mistakes, but it's so hard to pass somebody on the bottom here

"I was trying to do all I could do to get by (Kenseth) without getting into him. I probably could have bumped him a little bit there in the middle of (Turns) 1 and 2, but it was a lot of fun racing with Matt, there. We would like to be in Victory Lane, but my day is coming."

Brad Keselowski rallied from an earlier crash to finish sixth. Hamlin, Ryan Blaney, Truex, Jr. and Trevor Bayne rounded out the top ten.

Race Results

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