Kahne takes victory again at Pocono

Kasey Kahne took home his third victory in four weeks wining the Pocono 500 beating Brian Vickers by 3.7 seconds. Denny Hamlin, Dale Earnhardt, Jr and Jeff Burton rounded out the top five.

"It was a great afternoon," said a drained Kahne following the race. "The car ran so well here. Nothing close to us when we were up front. We had such a good car all weekend from the time practice started to qualify first and winning this deal feels really good.

"It seemed like the hottest race of the year. The track was hot. The lines, the grooves, my car was super, super good."

Even though Kahne took pole, holding on to the lead was quite the difficult task, different pit strategies and pit crew miscues left Kasey having to start over from scratch on just about every restart. The miscue by his pit crew had Kasey in his worst postion of the day, restarting in 38th. But Kahne overcame every mistake and took the lead from Brian Vickers with 19 laps to go and never looked back.

Meanwhile, points leader Kyle Busch had his worst day of the year finishing dead last on Sunday after going for an opening that wasn't there and collided with Jamie McMurrary. Busch ended up 105 laps down to winner Kahne. Busch troubles also didn't help his teammate Tony Stewart as Busch spun out late in the race and brought out the caution trapping Stewart a lap down, Stewart finished 35th.

Just about half of the cautions were caused by the open-wheel rookies with Dario Franchitti, Sam Hornish and Patrick Carpentier invovled in two to three incidents each. Franchitti was none too happy when Hornish collided with him lat in the race.

"The Hornish deal, I don't know," Franchitti said. "I went in there pretty deep compared to everybody else I was racing with and braking about the same point all day and I got to the apex and he drilled us. He must have been doing 50 miles per hour more. Maybe his brakes failed or his brain failed, I don't know."

With the win Kahne now moves up from 12th to 9th in points, while Kyle Busch holds on to a narrow 21 point lead over Jeff Burton. The series now moves on to Michigan where I hear that red-colored and beer sponsored number 9 cars do well at this track.

Kahne takes victory at Pocono (Autosport.com)