Busch Edges Bodine For 7th NCTS Victory

UPDATE Want to know what Sprint Cup will look like in a year or two? Just see the truck results below. Top 4 are Toyotas as well as 7 of top 10.

Kyle Busch celebrates winning the San Bernardino County 200 at Auto Club Speedway

Jerry Markland/Getty Images for NASCAR

02/23/08 At age 16, Busch was kicked out of Auto Club Speedway and banned from the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race there because the weekend also featured a CART event sponsored by cigarette maker Marlboro and federal law precluded persons under age 18 from participating in events sponsored by tobacco companies.

On Saturday, Busch returned to the two-mile track as a 22-year-old veteran and pulled away from Todd Bodine in the final 10 laps of the San Bernardino County 200 to claim his seventh win in the truck series and his first in a Toyota. Busch led 51 laps in opening a 20-point lead over Bodine, who won the season opener last week at Daytona International Speedway but entered the race tied in the points standings with Busch and Johnny Benson because of a 25-point penalty incurred for a bed panel height infraction at Daytona.

"This means the most to me than anything," said Busch, who finished 1.415 seconds ahead of Bodine. "In this race in 2001, I was kicked out of the racetrack. I probably could have sat on the pole and won the race that day."

Johnny Benson ran third in Saturday's race, the first leg of an unprecedented CTS/Nationwide Series doubleheader. Terry Cook was fourth, followed by 2007 series champion Ron Hornaday Jr., Ted Musgrave, Travis Kvapil, Mike Skinner, Colin Braun and Phillip McGilton.

Bodine held the lead from lap 58 to lap 75, before a cloud cover caused his No. 30 Toyota to tighten up. Busch reassumed the point on lap 76 and led the final 11 laps of the 100-lap event after the field completed a cycle of green-flag pit stops "That's exactly what happened," Bodine said of the cloud that changed the handling on his truck. "I told (crew chief) Mike (Hillman Sr.) that the clouds came over and gave him (Busch) a little more grip."

Bodine's crew put on scuffed tires during his last pit stop, but that left truck with a loose condition that prevented him from overtaking Busch, Bodine said.

Skinner and Hornaday, the two dominant CTS drivers in 2007, both recovered from early difficulty. Skinner's engine had a miss from the outset, but his team discovered a loose sparkplug wire on a Lap 6 pit stop and corrected the problem. A slow pit stop on lap 15 dropped Hornaday from the top 10, but by the time the field restarted on lap 49 after a caution for debris in Turn 3, Hornaday was running fourth. Another slow stop on his final trip to the pits, however, dropped Hornaday to fifth at the finish.

Notes: After struggling early, Jon Wood had worked his way back into the top 10 before breaking a rear-end gear during his lap 46 pit stop. He finished 32nd. . . Six weeks after Busch was kicked out of Auto Club Speedway in 2001, NASCAR imposed an age limit of 18 in all three of its top series, rendering Busch ineligible to compete in the 2002 season.

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