Sheldon Creed led three laps of Friday night's Food City 300 at Bristol Motor Speedway, and they were the last three. He passed William Sawalich on an overtime restart and won by 0.253 seconds in the No. 00 Haas Factory Team Chevrolet, his third win of the season in the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, the second of NASCAR's three national series.
Carson Kvapil and Jesse Love led 240 of the 305 laps between them. Kvapil led 156 and won the second stage, then finished 24th, four laps behind the winner. Love started on the pole, led the first 81 laps and finished 17th.
Creed leaves Bristol leading the Chase by 11 points over Justin Allgaier. The Chase is the series' nine-race playoff, and it opened by resetting the standings: Allgaier's 229-point lead over second place became 25. Creed won the opener at Darlington and took the lead by three points at Gateway. Six races remain, starting Oct. 3 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Allgaier has won twice as many races as Creed this season. At Bristol he led the restart on lap 286, and a lap later contact put him into the wall. He recovered to finish fourth and lost eight more points.
How a three-lap leader won
The race was scheduled for 300 laps, run in three segments called stages; the top 10 in each stage score points. Allgaier won the first. Kvapil, his JR Motorsports teammate, led every lap from 101 through 248.
Allgaier closed on Kvapil late in the race and passed him on lap 249. Kvapil reported a loose wheel and then a brake problem, according to lap-by-lap notes of the race, and made an unscheduled stop while the race was still running under green. Allgaier led the next 38 laps.
Patrick Staropoli's spin on the backstretch brought out a caution on lap 275. Creed said in his post-race news conference that he was running "10th-ish" when it came out and that "we weren't going to pass anyone in front of us." So, he said, "it was kind of a no-brainer for us to come down and get tires."
Eight cars, the top five among them, stayed out, according to the lap-by-lap notes. Creed was the first car off pit road among those that stopped, which made him, in his words, "the first one on tires. That's a big deal." Sawalich was not among the cars the notes list as stopping.
Allgaier led the restart on lap 286. A lap later, in Turns 1 and 2, Love's car got loose on the inside of Allgaier's and pushed it into the wall, the notes say. Love took the lead. Three laps after that, Love and Taylor Gray made contact racing for it, Love hit the wall, and Sawalich went by. Neither incident brought out a caution. Sawalich led from lap 290 through lap 302. By lap 294, according to the notes, Creed was second.
A crash in Turn 3 involving Ryan Sieg, Corey Day and Parker Retzlaff brought out the fifth caution in the closing laps and sent the race to overtime, NASCAR's green-flag restart for a race that would otherwise end under caution. That is why a 300-lap race ran 305. Creed took the lead from Sawalich on the restart and kept it.
Where the Chase stands
Creed scored 60 points on Friday and Allgaier 52. Creed has 2,235 and Allgaier 2,224, a gap of 11.
Asked whether that put him in control of the Chase, Creed pointed to the points the stages pay. "You can lose 11 points through stages," he said. "They just pay so much."
Kvapil and Love came to Bristol nine and 16 points out of the lead. They left it 37 and 41 out. Love is the defending series champion and won at Gateway a week earlier; Kvapil led 105 laps there before finishing fifth. Sam Mayer is fifth in the standings, 78 back, and Day and Sammy Smith are tied for sixth, 92 back.
Creed's three wins this season came at Atlanta in February, at Darlington and at Bristol, where he had never won before.
The rest of the field
Sawalich and Brent Crews, second and third, drive for Joe Gibbs Racing, and neither is in the Chase field. Allgaier was fourth, Day fifth, Gray sixth, Mayer seventh, Retzlaff eighth, Dean Thompson ninth and Smith 10th.
Lightning ended qualifying after four cars had made laps, and NASCAR set the starting lineup by formula instead, which put Love on the pole and Creed beside him.
The race ran 162.565 miles in one hour, 53 minutes and seven seconds, with five cautions for 47 laps and eight lead changes among five drivers.
Creed has led 238 laps this season. Allgaier has led 668. Creed leads the Chase.