NASCAR

Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon tried their best, but they fell short Sunday.
HOMESTEAD, Fla. (AP) -- Nothing could stop Kurt Busch from winning the closest championship in NASCAR history.
Not a broken wheel early in the race. Not four extra laps forced by a nerve-racking late restart. Not a double-barreled challenge by NASCAR's most successful team. Not all the pressure forged by a new playoff-style format.
On a day of high drama, with the season championship seemingly changing lap to lap, pass to pass, Busch held on to finish fifth behind teammate Greg Biffle in Sunday's Ford 400 and wrap up his first Nextel Cup title.
He won it by eight points over Jimmie Johnson -- a difference of just two places in the season-ending race -- and 16 over Jeff Gordon.
Big success
The dramatic finish was a fitting end to a season that has saw the inauguration of the 10-man, 10-race Chase for the Nextel Cup Championship that was a bigger success than new NASCAR chairman Brian France, the architect of the plan, could have hoped for.
After years of ho-hum championships, often decided weeks before the final race, Busch came into the finale leading Johnson by 18 points and Gordon by 21, with Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Mark Martin also having an outside shot at the title.
It looked as if Busch's lead might not be enough when the right front wheel broke on his Roush Racing Ford, nearly putting him into the wall separating the pit lane from the racetrack on the 93rd of 271 laps at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Somehow, Busch kept his car off the wall as the tire came off and bounced over the wall and onto the track, bringing out a caution flag and allowed him to stop for repairs without losing a lap. He fell to 28th, but fought his way back among the leaders and that was just good enough for the 26-year-old driver to win his first Cup title. The closest previous 1-2 finish came in 1992 when Alan Kulwicki beat Bill Elliott by 10 points.
Reaction
"It's an unbelievable deal," Busch said. "This is what a team does to win a championship. They persevere on a day such as this. All year long we've done things like this, whether we put ourselves in a hole or had a small problem. I just can't believe we were able to overcome all that turmoil today."
Busch, in just his fourth season in Cup, never wavered despite a championship battle too close to call through most of the race. The points lead changed several times -- sometimes on consecutive laps. At one point, with 75 laps remaining, the top four drivers were separated by only nine points.
Johnson and four-time champion Gordon gave it everything they had, finishing second and third after Biffle grabbed the lead on a restart on lap 270 and held off Johnson in the last event in the chase.
"With the 97 behind me there at the end, I knew the championship was out of the question and I was just racing Jeff for second," said Johnson, who had won four of the last five races.
Gordon failed to lead a lap in the race and said he knew he didn't have the car to win.
"We gave it a heck of an effort," Gordon said. "We had a flat left rear that really got us behind and we fought all day long. We struggled a little bit there at the beginning and got better and better. Those last couple of restarts, we had a shot at least to win the race.
"I don't know if that was going to win us the championship, but it was a great year."
Disappointment
Johnson and Gordon were disappointed not to be able to dedicate the championship to the 10 people who died Oct. 24 in the crash of a Hendrick Motorsports plane on the way to a race in Virginia. But Busch, whose younger brother, Kyle, drives for Hendrick in the Busch Series, took care of that, too.
"I'm choked up because there nothing harder in the NASCAR community than what we had to go through a couple weeks ago with Hendrick and the problem they had," Busch said. "I love them truly and I want to dedicate anything I can from this championship to them. My little brother was affected by this, so it hit home."
The end of the race was chaotic as Ryan Newman was knocked out of the lead when a deflating tire sent him hurtling into the wall on lap 265, just two laps before the scheduled finish.
That put Tony Stewart on top.
But Stewart's car started sputtering, running out of gas on the restart on lap 270 and Biffle, who led a race-high 117 laps, sped into the lead with the championship contenders close behind.
He held off Johnson by just 0.342-seconds -- about four car-lengths.
Earnhardt and Martin went into the race trailing Busch by 72 and 82 points, respectively. Late in the race, with everybody on different strategies, Martin was fourth, but only nine points out of the lead. But a late pit stop relegated him to an 11th-place finish and he wound up 107 points behind Busch.
Earnhardt never really contended, struggling to a 23rd-place finish and ending the year 138 points behind the champion.