"Yeah, we knew we had it all day, didn't we?" That was Clint Bowyer's sarcastic, yet jubilant, quote to his pit crew over the in-car radio after he took the checkered flag in Saturday night's Crown Royal 400 from Richmond International Raceway in a race highlighted by short-track fireworks in the event's last 20 laps. Denny Hamlin, a native of nearby Chesterfield, Va., dominated the evening's festivities, leading 381 of 400 laps and walking away from the field at times. He held a sizeable lead over Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kyle Busch with 20 laps to go when he felt his right front tire going down. In a stunning turn of events, Hamlin went from first to 15th before the tire finally let go and he crashed into the Turn 4 wall, bringing out the race's penultimate caution period. With Hamlin out of the way, a host of drivers led by Earnhardt and Busch lined up to slug it out for the win on Richmond's three-quarter-mile asphalt tri-oval. The restart with five laps to go had Clint Bowyer, Mark Martin, Tony Stewart, Martin Truex Jr. and Kevin Harvick lined up just behind the front two. Earnhardt and Busch put on quite a show from that point, battling for the point and running side-by-side until, with two-and-a-half laps remaining, Busch got slightly loose under Earnahrdt in Turn 3 and turned the No. 88 Chevy sideways and into the fence. Snap-on's Clint Bowyer dove under the two and took the caution flag as the race leader. A green-white-checker "overtime" period would decide the winner. With Earnhardt -- like Hamlin just three laps earlier -- now out of the way, Bowyer would have to hold off a hard-charging and over-aggressive Busch if he intended to record his second Sprint Cup victory. With Mark Martin's help, he did just that. Martin pulled alongside the No. 18 of Busch on the restart and gave the 23-year-old all he could handle over the final two laps, enabling Bowyer to sprint away from the field for the win, uncontested. "They were just racing so hard there and you knew it was going to happen," an elated Bowyer said of the Earnhardt-Busch clash. "I just took advantage of a misfortune right there. But I'm real happy for all these guys and for BB&T. She was fast all night long. I messed up in qualifying for these guys in starting in the back, but was able to bounce back so that was really good." Busch held off Martin to finish second. They were followed by Stewart in fourth, Truex fifth and Ryan Newman, Carl Edwards, Kevin Harvick, Jeff Gordon and Kasey Kahne in sixth through 10th. Earnhardt managed a 15th-place finish after his run-in with the wall, while Hamlin settled for a 24th-place showing. "You know, we were just one little whisker off of being able to get it done tonight," third-place Martin said. "It was very close. But the car, we got off a little bit the middle of the race and lost some track position and then got the car back something better toward the end; not quite a hundred percent, but we got it better. It was tough out there." "I don't think we were a fifth-place car by any means at the end, but at times throughout the race we were," Snap-on's Truex said of his evening. "So, I'm proud of the guys. They did a good job for me all night. The motor ran really good tonight. We just had to hang around. Finally at the end of one of these deals usually we're one of the ones getting wrecked or blowing up or having all the unfortunate luck." Eighth-place finisher Kevin Harvick was frustrated despite his top-10 finish that kept him in the top five in the NASCAR Sprint Cup point standings: "I think everyone was pretty loose at the start of the race," he explained. "Todd (Berrier, crew chief) and the guys kept working on our Shell-Pennzoil Chevrolet to get it better. There was a point there about mid-race when we were pretty good and made some good moves to the top-three, but then the car just started going away again and we couldn't seem to get it back. It was a decent points night for us, but we want to be running up front and contending for wins. I know everyone at RCR will continue to work hard on our program to get us where we need to be." Snap-on's Sam Hornish Jr. finished 23rd in the event, while Paul Menard placed 31st. Kurt Busch finished 42nd after a hard hit in the night's biggest wreck which started when Dave Blaney, J.J. Yeley and Carl Edwards got tangled up on lap 231. Yeley ended up in the wall while a gaggle of cars behind him, including Busch, defending race-winner Jimmie Johnson, Johnny Sauter, Juan Pablo Montoya, David Gilliland, Regan Smith and Michael McDowell, all were collected in the ensuing melee. Jeff Burton narrowly avoided the wreck and slid through en route to an 11th-place finish.
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