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Seriously helped by a late race caution, Jimmie Johnson powered ahead to win the rain delayed Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Clint Bowyer finished second, his best in several years, followed by Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth and Joey Logano.Kyle Larson, Chase Ellioytty, Martin Truex Jr., Ricky Stenhouse Jr., and Denny Hamlin rounded out the top ten. Ty Dillon was the highest finishing rookie.

Larson contributes to lead the point standings with 360 points, 27 ahead of Chase Elliott. Truex, Jr, Logano and Keselowski round out the top five. Johnson, Jamie McMurray, Bowyer, Harvick and Tyan Blaney round out the top ten.

The 500-lap race was slowed by nine cautions for 76 laps, two of those cautions being segment cautions which were won by Kyle Busch and Stenhouse Jt.

“Every lap was like a qualifying lap,” stated Bowyer in his post-race interview when asked how he felt about the treatment to the racing surface which is similar but less tham the treatment to NHRA drag racing surfaces. “I know that everybody wants to see that Bristol of old and ring around the bottom and us beating and banging and moving cars. I'm telling you, the workload, the effort that you put into driving that car, you can't drive them any harder than that. Literally it's a qualifying lap almost every single time. I think they've done a great job of creating that environment. You know, Kyle and I were just talking it really is an ever changing race track, a lot like a dirt track, and even within runs, not so much just within the day, within a run. You'll start on the bottom, get up there and find something on the outside, and hell, by the end of the run you might be right back on the bottom and finding better grip and better speed down there. It's a ton of fun to be able to race like that, and it's extremely challenging, and I hope that we can sell that and do a good job of selling that because if we can't, I don't know how else to do it, because I'm telling you, I've been doing this a long time, and that's about as hard as I've ever drove in my life. I mean, it's a qualifying lap every lap.”

Johnson's second win of the season came after the Eatern weekend off time which came after his win at Texas Motor Speedway. The win is also his 82nd career NASCAR Cup Series win, all under the work of crew chief Chad Knaus.

“This track has been really difficult for me over the years,” admitted Johnson. “To be able to find what we did Saturday afternoon it’s honestly what I’ve been looking for, for 16 years up here. My guys nailed their pit stops all day long. Great team effort, just a ton of fun out there racing. This track has always been very racy, but now that we can hunt the bottom and we can run two and three wide and put on a heck of a show for the fans (it's better racing).”

Crew Chief Chad Knaus also liked the position the surface treatment put them in.

“I think what helped us the most this weekend is that everybody else was lost,” revealed Knaus. “Don't know if that makes sense or not. But you didn't have a standout at our company that was maybe the car that you needed to pay attention to that was really fast, so you kind of look at their notes and look at what it is that they do. We just stepped back, there was a lot of frustration from Jimmie, honestly, after midway through the first practice session and we were able to just be like, look, let's just do what conceptually we think is correct, and we threw a lot of the convention away from it that we had done in the past and we had seen in the past work, and just made some things happen.”

What happened was a much desired victory.