After a winless season in the Sprint Cup Series in 2008, Matt Kenseth is perfect so far this year, as he picked up his
second consecutive victory by taking Sunday’s Auto Club 500 at Auto Club Speedway. Kenseth, who won last weekend’s rain-shortened Daytona 500, became the first driver to win the first two races in the season since Jeff Gordon did it in 1997. “I’m so blessed that I have such a great race team,” Kenseth said. “I thank these guys. They gave me a pit stop that got me into clean air and that’s just a huge difference.” Kenseth grabbed the lead for the final time when he beat Gordon off of pit road on lap 213. With less than 20 laps remaining, the battle for the win came down to Kenseth and Gordon with third-place Kyle Busch trailing five seconds behind. Gordon made several attempts to chase Kenseth down in the closing laps, but could not catch the leader, as he finished second. “It was a lot of fun,” Gordon said. “This is a new team, and it showed tonight. We still got a little bit of work to do, but man I am so excited on one side because we ran so good and we started the season off so great. But I’m so mad on the other hand because I felt like we had what it took to win tonight.” Even though Gordon won the first qualifying race at Daytona International Speedway a week and a half ago, the four-time Cup Series champion has not won a points-paying race since October 2007 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Busch set a NASCAR record Saturday by winning the Camping World Truck and Nationwide Series races on the same day, but his attempt for a trifecta at California came up short with a third-place finish.
Greg Biffle and Kurt Busch rounded out the top-five.