KANSAS CITY, Kan. \u2014 With a flawlessly executed race from start to finish, Brandon Jones preserved his bragging rights at Kansas Speedway, winning Saturday\u2019s Kansas Lottery 300 NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoff event.<\/p>\n
The only driver in the field to have won a previous Xfinity race at the 1.5-mile intermediate track, Jones pulled away during the final 38-lap green-flag and beat runner-up rookie sensation Connor Zilisch to the finish line by 2.787 seconds.<\/p>\n
With the victory, his second of the season, his third at Kansas and the seventh of his career, Jones claimed a berth in the Playoff\u2019s Round of 8. Zilisch and defending series champion Justin Allgaier also advanced to the next round on points.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was exactly like how we needed that to go down,\u201d said Jones, who started from the pole, led 54 of 200 laps and finished second in each of the first two stages. \u201cTwo really solid stages\u2014no mistakes. The entire day was so well executed. That\u2019s probably by far in my career my most well-executed race.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so proud of these guys (his No.20 Joe Gibbs Racing team). We worked so hard all week to get here and put a race like this together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Allgaier and Sam Mayer stayed out on 15-lap older tires during the fourth and final caution of the afternoon, hoping for a subsequent caution that would allow them to use their final set of Goodyears. But the caution never came, and Allgaier and Mayer finished 13thand 16th, respectively.<\/p>\n
Allgaier, who won the first two stages and led a race-high 79 laps, didn\u2019t have a problem with crew chief Jim Pohlman\u2019s strategic call.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey work for you sometimes, they don\u2019t some other times,\u201d Allgaier said. \u201cDisappointed\u2026 our (No. 7 JR Motorsports) Chevrolet was really good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though the handling of his No. 88 Chevrolet wasn\u2019t precisely to his liking, Zilisch scored his 16th straight top-five result, breaking a tie with Sam Ard (1983) for the series record.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t feel like our car was winning-capable, except at a point there in stage three, I thought we had a chance at it,\u201d said Zilisch, who led 42 laps. \u201cWe\u2019ll look at it and see what we could have done better. We were just kind of throwing Hail Marys at it all day and trying to make one stick\u2014but it didn\u2019t stick.\u201d<\/p>\n
Austin Hill finished third, followed by fellow Playoff drivers Sammy Smith, Sheldon Creed, Taylor Gray, Jesse Love and Nick Sanchez.<\/p>\n
Next Saturday\u2019s final Round of 12 race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Road Course has the makings of an intense battle for the final positions in the Round of 8. Love, the last driver above the current elimination line, leads Sanchez by five points, Hill by seven, Harrison Burton (20th Saturday after starting from the rear) by eight and Smith by 14.<\/p>\n
Mayer, highest in the standings of the drivers not yet locked into the Round of 8, has a 38-point cushion entering the final event in the round, the Blue Cross NC 250 (5 p.m. ET, Oct. 4 on CW, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).<\/p>\n
Contact from Sanchez\u2019s No. 48 Chevrolet knocked the No.19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota of Justin Bonsignore out of the race in 37th place and dropped that car nine points below the elimination line in the owners\u2019 standings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KANSAS CITY, Kan. \u2014 With a flawlessly executed race from start to finish, Brandon Jones preserved his bragging…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-176105","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nascar","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}