Kyle Busch, still hurting following Daytona crash, claims Toyota / Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway

SONOMA - “We really needed this win,” said every victorious athlete ever.

But coming into the Toyota/Save Mart 350, nobody needed a win quite like Kyle Busch.

After missing 11 races following a devastating crash at Daytona in which he suffered a compound fracture of his lower right leg and a broken left foot, Busch has been working himself out of a huge hole in 2015. NASCAR gave him a glimmer of hope by ruling that he could make the Chase for the Cup playoffs by (a) winning at least one race and (b) finishing in the top 30 in the final Sprint Cup points standings. But even those benchmarks looked like long shots.

“I figured the win would be the hardest to get,” Busch said after Sunday’s race.

But he checked that box at Sonoma Raceway, holding off older brother Kurt Busch and claiming an unlikely victory. It was Kyle Busch’s second win at Sonoma, and it ended a streak of 10 different winners in 10 years here.

It was banner day for the Busch brothers. They came into the race with 57 Sprint Cup victories between them – 30 by Kyle, 27 by Kurt – but had never before swept the top two spots.

“That’s a pretty special moment,” Kurt Busch said. “I’ve got over 500 starts. I know he’s over 300. Can you imagine, 800 starts between the two of us, we almost have 30 wins each, and that’s the first time we’ve ever finished one-two. Now I wish I would have gotten up there and moved him.”

But nothing was going to knock Kyle Busch off course this time. Fiery and daring, loved by many and almost certainly hated by many more, he is as tenacious as any driver on the circuit, and that was apparent Sunday.

No one could have seen this coming. In his four previous starts in 2015, Busch finished 11th, 36th, ninth and 43rd. Four weeks ago at Dover he was solidly entrenched in the top five before a collision with Brian Scott sent him to the back. Two weeks ago in Michigan he tried to pass on a drizzly day and crashed hard.

Busch is a noted road racer, but even his Sonoma results had been disappointing recently. Since winning here seven years ago he had failed to make it back into the top 10.

And as team owner Joe Gibbs said after the race, this was precisely the course he and crew chief Adam Stevens had worried about the most. Busch’s left foot isn’t fully healed, and the twisting, up-and-down roadway of Sonoma would test it like no other venue.

NASCAR drivers use their clutch only to get into first gear, but…

“The brake pedal was really hard - I’m a left-foot braker,” Busch said. “… Getting up the hill is a little bit of brakes, but the most brakes you see is Turn 4, Turn 7, Turn 11, and you see a thousand pounds of brake pressure. I don’t know what that equates to if you were doing a leg press, but it’s a lot. The foot definitely tells me that it’s a lot.”

Busch said that during practice here Friday, his left foot went to “about a 7 on the a 1-to-10 of a pain scale,” but after icing it that night it hadn’t been an issue again until late in Sunday’s race.

“When you’ve got fresh tires and seven laps to go and you see the checked flag waiting for you, you know, you forget about all those things,” Busch said.

His win was the result of fortitude, yes, but also of canny – and lucky – pit strategy. On Lap 75, Busch pulled into Pit Road just before a caution flag came out for J.J. Yeley’s crash, allowing him to re-enter the course in favorable position. And when the yellow flags came out on Lap 100, for what would turn out to be the final caution, crew chief Adam Stevens had Busch pit one final time.

“There at the end it just kind of fell into the strategy that we wanted to run anyway, and we knew that we didn’t have what we needed to outrun them on old tires, so it was a no-brainer call,” Stevens said.

It was his first win as a Sprint Cup crew chief. Gibbs shook up his teams in December and reassigned Stevens to Busch. The match is looking pretty good.

Clint Bowyer finished third, points leader Kevin Harvick continued his impressive run by landing fourth and Joey Logano made a late push for fifth.

Jeff Gordon didn’t fare so well. The local hero, who grew up in Vallejo but moved to Indiana when he was 14, was making his final run at Sonoma; he’ll retire after this season. He looked strong for most of the afternoon, but gambled by staying out late on old tires and ended up 16th, his worst finish here in a decade.

At least Gordon didn’t crash, a fate that befell several of his peers on the treacherous road course. David Gilliland blew a tire and hammered his car into a tire barrier on Lap 23. Yeley got into the dirt, skidded across the track and smacked the wall on Lap 75. And Casey Mears spun out on the approach to hairpin Turn 11 on Lap 100 and lost his a tire – not to mention part of his axle. The whole assembly bounded a couple hundred yards into a chain-link fence.

David Ragan was involved in two wrecks. Carl Edwards took the blame for the second, when he and Ragan tried to go side-by-side into a turn on Lap 80 and both wound up in the tire stacks. Ragan’s first accident was more contentious. On Lap 30, he retaliated for what he perceived as over-aggressive driving by Martin Truex Jr. and spun Truex off the road.

Track officials ordered a red flag as they had to reposition a concrete barrier.

“We both ran out of room and I guess he turned me on purpose,” Truex said.

“Martin would probably not do that again if he had the opportunity,” Ragan answered.

Kyle Busch knows something about crashes. He may be able to overcome his, at least on the scoreboard. Now we’ll see if he can defeat it mentally. His next race is at Daytona, where he hit that wall on Feb. 21.

“I’m looking forward to getting out there on the racetrack and attacking that demon,” he said.

By driving like one, as Busch demonstrated Sunday.