Kyle Busch driving the No. 51 Miccosukee Resort and Gaming Toyota Tundra brought Billy Ballew Motorsports back to victory lane Wednesday night during the running of the O’Reilly 200 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at the Bristol Motor Speedway.

Busch who was fast off the truck in practice, continued into qualifying where he posted a time of 15.539 seconds at a speed of 123.483mph placing him in the third place position for the 200 lap event.

Busch took the lead early and clearly showed he had the dominant truck in the event. Busch led 145 laps of the race and posted 60 of the fastest laps on the track during the record caution filled event. (12 cautions for 69 laps, including a red flag period.)

The 23-year-old driving dynamo also made history tonight by posting the most single season wins (17) in the NASCAR Premier Touring Series.

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“This is definitely a great race team,” Busch said. “It’s a lot of fun with Billy Ballew (owner), Richie (Wauters, crew chief) and all these guys. We just had a great race tonight. This thing was pretty good when we unloaded it. Same stuff as last year. We just kind of fine-tuned on it a little bit. We got into it a little bit with Johnny (Benson) there. Sorry about that. I didn’t even see him come down there. I got my nose in there, and he was trying to miss a lapped truck, I guess. Overall, we just wanted to stay up front up all night and keep our nose clean. To bring this Miccosukee Resorts and NOS Energy Drink Toyota to victory lane is awesome.”

Billy Ballew Motorsports second entry, the No. 15 Ergon Tundra with NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver David Stremme behind the wheel came from a disappointing 30th place start to finish ninth. Stremme made his first start in a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event at the .533-mile short track.

The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series is off until Saturday, September 6th when they take to the track at the Gateway International Raceway in St. Louis, MO.   (photo Ronda Greer)