Kyle Busch won the N.C. Education Lottery 200 from Charlotte Motor Speedway, but the big story was the NASCAR debut of the 2007 Formula One champion, Kimi Raikkonen.
Raikkonen started 31st in his Kyle Busch Motorsports number 15 Perky Jerky Toyota and managed to finish in the 15th position. It was a very impressive debut for Raikkonen. Raikkonen passed quite a few trucks, went three-wide on multiple occasions, and even hit the wall a couple times en-route to his top-15 finish.
The soft-spoken Finn's debut was huge for the international media. Raikkonen had hordes of photographers and reporters located around his garage stall for most of practice this morning. Tonight's race was telecast live in Finland, and SPEED's coverage of the Formula One Spanish GrandPrix practice this morning to see Raikkonen's first laps in CWTS practice live.
Tonight's race saw ten cautions, which tied a race record. At least six of those cautions happened right in front of Raikkonen who did a great job to miss all of them. The most trouble Raikkonen had was when he put himself into the wall twice.
Timothy Peters started the race on the pole and led for quite a bit, but his race ended when he got involved in a wreck to bring out the 5th caution of the race.
Clint Bowyer led most of the race and looked like he had the truck to beat, but got passed by Kyle Busch for the lead with about seven laps to go. It looked like Bowyer would come back on Busch, but he got into the wall off of turn four with three laps to go.
Once Busch took the lead he never looked back, but the win didn't come easy for Busch as it has in many other races. Busch's truck was very loose most of the night, as were almost all of the other trucks as well. Busch's truck was so loose that he actually spun out of off turn four to bring out the fourth caution of the race. But Kyle would eventually come back as he usually does. Tonight's win was his 97th win across all three of NASCAR's top divisions.
Rookie Cole Whitt backed up last week's second place run at Dover with a third place finish tonight.Whitt looked impressive throughout, and now leads the points standings.
Top 5:
Busch
Bowyer
Whitt
Buescher
Hornaday
Notable:
Raikkonen finished 15th
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