A pit road miscue that dropped Greg Biffle's dominant Ford - at least for the time being - out of contention has allowed polesitter Tony Stewart to regain the lead in the Bank of America 500 at Charlotte. The race is 170 laps old, past the 167-lap midpoint. Stewart shows the way ahead of Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards, Marcos Ambrose, and David Ragan.
The rest of the top-10 includes Matt Kenseth - who took four tires on the most-recent caution period while most of the leaders took four - followed by Ryan Newman, Denny Hamlin, A.J. Allmendinger, and Trevor Bayne. Biffle, still trying to recover from a missing lugnut that necessitated a second-trip down the pit lane, is shown 15th.
For Bayne, it is easily the best run he has had since winning the season-opening Daytona 500 in February. That triumph in the Great American Race endeared the 20-year-old native of Knoxville to the masses. He had struggled mightily since that win on the Sprint Cup side of things while victimized by bad luck on the Nationwide Series side. In addition he missed a month of action while being treated for Lyme Disease. Tonight - which began with the devout Christian offering the pre-race invocation - he has run in the top-10 for nearly the entire duration of the race and routinely turned among the fastest laps on the track.