Kyle Busch dominates to take first win at Martinsville

Kyle Busch has a Cup win at Martinsville.

Busch entered Sunday's race 0-21 at the half-mile track and absolutely dominated, leading 352 of the race's 500 laps. He pulled away from teammate Matt Kenseth on a late-race restart and kept AJ Allmendinger at bay as the laps ticked down.

Kenseth, who restarted to Busch's outside on the front row of that restart with 12 laps to go, finished 15th.

"To win here at Martinsville is pretty cool," Busch said. "Finally take a clock home. People said I didn't deserve yesterday's – maybe I don't. But I got one today."

"Yesterday" is a reference towards Saturday's Truck Series race, which Busch entered and also dominated. The win was his 45th in 130 Truck starts but his first win at Martinsville in either of NASCAR's top three series.

So yes, even if you wanted to nitpick Busch's win the day before for coming against a lower-level field, there's no denying he's now a legitimate owner of the grandfather clocks the track hands out as trophies to the winners of its races.

The 2015 champion's car was flat-out the best throughout the entire race. He said near the end of the race that the brake pedal was chattering, but that chattering must not have been too bad. Or maybe his car was that much better than the rest of the field.

Restarts were competitors' best chance to get past Busch in the last half of the race and no one was able to take advantage.

"That was the key to the race, being able to restart on the bottom like that," Busch said of the final restart. "[Joe Gibbs Racing] all talked as a group earlier this morning about how we were going to do that and what we were going to do and we all said 'OK with 10 to go it's pretty much off-limits.' And it was 12 to go so it was pretty much on the brink there. Sorry, Matt."

Busch had the bottom lane – and preferred groove – on the final restart of the race. But on the restart before that, he took the top side and utilized the agreement mentioned above among teammates. Kenseth restarted second on that second-to-last restart too and Busch was able to cut in front of him on the bottom side before getting in to turn 1.

The win also puts Busch a track closer to a Sprint Cup schedule sweep. Of the 22 tracks on the Cup Series schedule, Busch has now won at all but Charlotte, Kansas and Pocono. As all three of those tracks host two races a season, it wouldn't be too surprising to see Busch grab wins at all three in the very near future.