Twenty years of NASCAR at Kansas Speedway: Top 5 memories from two decades of racin’
NASCAR came to Kansas Speedway when it opened in 2001 and marks 20 years of racing this weekend.
This week The Star has counted down 20 memorable moments from the Cup, Xfinity and trucks series during the past two decades.
With no further delay, here are the top five.
No. 5: Front Row Joe sweeps
Oct. 9-10, 2004, Xfinity and NASCAR Cup
They called Joe Nemechek “Front Row Joe” for a reason. He knew how to qualify for races.
Winning was something else.
But on one glorious weekend, Nemechek did something that no one had accomplished before or since at Kansas Speedway. He swept both the then-Busch series and Cup series races on the same weekend. And he won the Cup race from the pole.
Nemechek came into Kansas Speedway having not won in 54 Cup starts and was driving for a team that had won just one race in almost eight years of existence. But he beat Greg Biffle by 0.041 seconds, the closest margin of victory in the Busch series that season, and the next day, he edged Ricky Rudd by 0.81 seconds for his fourth career Cup win.
“This is what dreams are made of,” Nemechek said. “Winning both races and getting the pole here … what an incredible weekend.”
He hasn’t won a Cup or Xfinity Series race since.
No. 4: Gordon wins inaugural race
Sept. 30, 2001, NASCAR Cup
Jeff Gordon was no different than any of the 43 drivers who lined up for the inaugural then-Winston Cup race at Kansas Speedway.
He wanted to make history.
Gordon, starting from the second position next to pole-sitter Jason Leffler, proceeded to win his sixth race of the season by making a bold move on the 246th of 267 laps. He came out of turn four, dipped low on Mark Martin, and took the lead. Gordon would go on to win his fourth and final series championship.
“I guess everybody wants to be the guy who wins the first event at a new racetrack,” said Gordon, who had won inaugural NASCAR events at Indianapolis and Fontana, Calif.
No. 3: Logano spins Kenseth all the way out
Oct. 18, 2015, Sprint Cup
Two-time Kansas Speedway champion Matt Kenseth was leading the Hollywood Casino 400 with five laps remaining when Joey Logano spun him out and went on to claim the checkered flag.
Kenseth, who was in a must-win position to advance to the next round of the NASCAR playoffs, had been aggressively blocking Logano for at least 10 laps and was understandably livid afterward, especially because Logano had already qualified for the next round of the postseason.
“He just lifted my tires off the ground and wrecked me,” Kenseth said. “It’s hard to drive with the rear tires off the ground.”
Not surprisingly, Logano’s account of what transpired differed, calling the incident “good, hard racing.”
Two weeks later, Kenseth got his revenge. Kenseth was nine laps down when he intentionally wrecked Logano, driving him to the wall at Martinsville, effectively ending Logano’s championship hopes.
Kenseth was suspended by NASCAR for two races, an unprecedented penalty for an on-track incident, for those actions.
No. 2: Edwards makes a banzai move
Sept. 28, 2008, Sprint Cup
Columbia’s Carl Edwards was so desperate to win a NASCAR Cup race at his home track, he was willing to try anything.
And he did.
On the second-to-last turn on the final lap, Edwards tried a “banzai” move to take the lead — and the victory — from Jimmie Johnson. Heading into turn three, Edwards moved under Johnson’s car and slid up the track to cut off a counter-move.
That might work in video games, but not on the asphalt of a NASCAR track. Edwards, unable to defeat the laws of centrifugal force, kept sliding and slammed into the wall, enabling Johnson to reclaim the lead and win the race.
“I just figured, hell with it, I don’t want to finish second here,” Edwards said. “I want to win this race more than anything in the world, so I kind of banzaied it in there. I always wanted to try to do that.”
No. 1: This night was straight fire
May 13, 2017, NASCAR Cup
It was fiery, frightening and simply the most spectacular collision in Kansas Speedway history. The night before Mother’s Day, a hard-charging Aric Almirola plowed into the disabled cars of Joey Logano and Danica Patrick, who had collided on the 199th lap.
The chain reaction began when a broken brake rotor in Logano’s No. 22 Ford forced him to violently turn left between turns one and two and bump Patrick’s No. 10 Ford from behind, sending her spinning into the wall nose-first.
Almirola, with nowhere to go, slammed into the parked cars. The force of the impact sent the rear of Almirola’s No. 43 Ford into the air, while Patrick’s car exploded into flames.
Almirola’s car came to a rest near the outside fence. He immediately dropped the window net by the driver’s side door to indicate he was conscious. The race was red-flagged for 36 tense minutes as safety crews had to cut off the roof to safely extricate him from the car.
Patrick and Logano emerged from their cars unscathed. Almirola, conscious and alert throughout, was placed on a backboard and taken by helicopter to the hospital with a compression fracture of his T-5 vertebrae. He would miss seven races before returning to racing.
“It’s a total fact in our sport,” Patrick said afterward. “Some of the worst-looking accidents, drivers walk away. In the ones that don’t look as bad, they don’t.
“Whether it’s Aric in this accident, or Dale Earnhardt Sr., the ones that don’t look the worst can be. That’s the scary part. You’re playing Russian roulette, and at one point in time, something is going to affect you. I hope and pray that it does not happen, but you’re rolling the dice.”
This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM.