CONCORD, N.C. -- With trash on his radiator grille and four worn tires, Brad Keselowski ran away from the field in the final laps of the Dollar General 300 Friday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The Nationwide Series points leader padded his lead as he took his fifth victory of the year and his 11th career win. It was his first checkered flag at the 1.5-mile Charlotte track.
Keselowski now leads Carl Edwards in the Nationwide championship points race by an almost-insurmountable 450 points with four races remaining. Edwards finished 13th.
Keselowski led 46 laps, including the final 35 laps, and won by about 10 car lengths, or 1.137 seconds, over Martin Truex Jr. Finishing third was Justin Allgaier, followed by Joey Logano and Clint Bowyer.
"I'm so mentally exhausted after this race," Keselowski said. "I thought that was the best race I've ever seen in my life. That was awesome."
Danica Patrick stayed out of trouble but struggled with an ill-handling car and finished 21st, two laps down.
"We tried to work with it," Patrick told ESPN afterwards. "A couple of changes were good, but nothing overcame that feeling of not being gripped up out there.
"But we did our best. We'll take the high points and we'll take a non-crashed car home and move on. The good news is next year these tracks won't be new tracks for me. Hopefully we can have the improvement we had last weekend at Fontana. It's a bummer that we couldn't have had a better night in the GoDaddy car, but it's okay. We got a few more."
Keselowski ran the final 56 laps on the same set of tires after staying out while others pitted during a yellow flag with 44 laps to go. But his crew chief, Paul Wolfe, made an adjustment on the team's final stop -- a green flag stop on lap 144 -- that Keselowski said made the difference. So despite the old tires and the debris on the radiator, Keselowski ran the fastest lap of the race with just seven circuits remaining.
We weren't very good the first half of the race, but that guy (Wolfe) is amazing," Keselowski said. "He gave me the car I needed to win at the end of the race. Our last adjustment on pit road was really phenomenal and got our car going and where it needed to be to beat those guys."
Keselowski and Truex battled side-by-side for the lead after the final two restarts, but Keselowski was able to shoot ahead coming off turn two with seven laps to go and he pulled away after that.
Wolfe said team members burned the midnight oil Thursday night to make some final adjustments that helped the car to victory lane. "We were off a good bit on Wednesday," Wolfe said. "We worked real hard and looked at all data trying to figure out where we could make some gains. We came back Thursday and had a good practice."
Kyle Busch led the most laps -- 84 -- but slipped back with handling problems late in the race and finished sixth.
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