Kyle Busch holds off Logano at Atlanta

Kyle Busch

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The race for the championship took a major turn Sunday night as Kyle Busch clinched a spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup while defending series champion Brad Keselowski saw his chances of a repeat title slip away with just one more race left before the start of the Chase for the Sprint Cup begins.

Busch beat out Joey Logano to claim his fourth race victory of the season in the AdvoCare 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway in a race with major implications in the series points battle.

After fighting an ill-handling race car all night, Busch took the lead following a round of pit stops with 35 laps to go, beating Ryan Newman and Logano off pit road. Busch went onto lead the rest of the way, holding on through two more late caution flags to beat Logano by .740 seconds.

“My boys, my boys on pit road," said Busch. “They’re amazing. I love those guys. I would do anything for them. I can’t say enough about this team and their work tonight. Their work tonight definitely helped me out a lot.

“For as bad as I may have been talking (on the radio), they certainly never gave up. They kept going to work and trying to figure things out for me and make my life a little easier behind the wheel."

Busch joined four other drivers locked up a spot in the 12-car Chase field on Sunday, including Kevin Harvick, Carl Edwards and Kasey Kahne.

It was quite a change from just a year ago, when Busch barely missed out on Chase spot by just three points, missing the cut for the second time in his career.

“A heck of a lot different than 365 days ago, I’ll tell you that much," said Busch. “You know, it all comes full circle sometimes, but we were in a whole different situation 365 days ago and not being able to make the Chase, and tonight was a night where we needed to prove to ourselves that we're championship contenders.

“The championship is No. 1 on anybody's list. For me I'm a NASCAR driver, and I want to be able to win NASCAR championships. One of these days it will happen, and maybe it's 2013. Hopefully it is."

Martin Truex, Jr., nursing a broken wrist and driving with a cast on his arm, finished third. Kurt Busch and Ryan Newman rounded out the top five.

Logano’s second-place run gave a much needed boost to his effort to make it into the Chase field, but his good fortune came at the expense of his teammate and defending Sprint Cup Champion Brad Keselowski who now finds himself on the outside looking in.

Keselowski, who came into Sundays race trailing Logano by four points for the 10th spot in the Chase, was leading the race with 82 laps to go when his engine started dropping cylinders. By lap 307, he was in the garage and done for the night, ending up finishing 35th – dropping him to 15th in points, 28 points out of 10th place.

With no victories this season, Keselowski has little chance of securing a wildcard berth and needs to finish in the top-10 in points to make the Chase field.

“What can you do?" said Keselowski. “You can sit here and be mad and stomp your feet and be a jerk about it, but it just broke. That’s racing. It’s kind of been the story of our year.

“There’s only so much you can control. Maybe this was control and maybe it wasn’t, but we ran up front and we continue to show that we at least have the pieces of what it takes every week to be a title threat and to be in the Chase, but we just haven’t put together all those pieces every week and that’s what it takes."

Things didn’t go much better for the drivers already locked into the Chase.

Jimmie Johnson’s bad luck continued this week as the series points leader got tangled up in an early incident on a restart on lap 32, resulting in severe front-end damage for himself and teammate Kasey Kahne.

Johnson’s crew was able to patch is Chevrolet back together to eke out a 28th-place finish, while Kahne spent time behind the wall and ended up 36th, but still locked in the Chase.

With Johnson nursing a damaged car, the door was open for second-place points contender Clint Bowyer, who seemed poised to make up some points on Johnson after he grabbed the lead on lap 139, but Bowyers night ended early when his engine expired with 132 laps to go, and ended up losing ground to Johnson, now trailing by 28 points.

After Bowyer and Keselowski fell out of the lead, Logano regained the top spot and was at the front of the field when Johnson spun on lap 290 to bring out the yellow flag.

Logano led the field onto pit road, trailed by Newman, Kyle Busch and Harvick, but Busch’s crew got him out ahead of Newman and Logano, who momentarily got hung up behind Kurt Busch and lost the lead.

Logano eventually fell back as far as eighth after the restart as Kyle Busch had his hands full up front holding off his brother Kurt Busch – who roared up from eighth to second on the restart – and Martin Truex, Jr.

Logano would finally thread his way back to the front, passing Truex for second with four laps to go, but there was too much ground to make up and not enough laps to do it.

“I just needed five more laps for me to have a shot at it," said Logano. “It’s just so frustrating when you’ve got the winning car and you don’t win. It took probably six laps to get it going and we proved that we had the long run car, and we were trying to get there.

“That’s three straight top fives with this car, thought, and that’s impressive. We’ll take that and it was a big points day for us for Richmond next week, so we have nothing to hold our heads down about. Second sucks, but we can’t be too mad about it."