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Almirola will in his second full-time season in the Cup Series for RPM.

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On lap 312, as Bowyer went to pass Gordon on the inside, Gordon retaliated, turning Bowyer. Gordon and Bowyer collected Joey Logano, who was outside of Gordon, and all three cars hit the wall. All three cars suffered heavy damage. Aric Almirola spun behind them and slid into Joey Logano’s already-damaged race car.

After Gordon got out of his car in the garage area, some of the crew from the No. 15 Michael Waltrip Racing Toyota team came over to voice their displeasure with his antics. A melee ensued between the crews with people being shoved to the ground. Bowyer hopped out of his car and ran back to the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports hauler to confront Gordon.

NASCAR officials prevented Bowyer from entering the No.  24 hauler.

After the melee, the two drivers were summoned to the NASCAR hauler. They also addressed the situation.

Gordon said:

Things have gotten escalated over the year and I have just had it. Clint (Bowyer) has run into me numerous times, wrecked me and he got into me on the back straightaway, pretty much ruined our day. I have had it, was fed up with it and got him back.

Bowyer said:

I mean the racing — it’s just a shame. The last person in the world you want to get into anything with is Jeff Gordon on the race track. I mean, you’re down there racing, the track’s extremely slick, we’re all on tires — I didn’t even need to pass him. That’s the thing. All I was doing is riding around biding my time. The only thing I had to do is keep the 5 car (Kasey Kahne) within reach, so for him to act like that — I mean, I barely touched him and then I feel him get into turn three and try to turn me and he missed and then next thing I know Brett’s (Griffin, spotter) telling me on the radio that he’s trying to — he’s waiting on me. It’s pretty embarrassing for a four-time champion — and what I consider one of the best this sport’s ever seen — to act like that is just completely ridiculous.

NASCAR later penalized Gordon for violating Sections 12-1 (actions detrimental to stock car racing) – altercation with another competitor on the race track during the race. He has been fined $100,000, docked 25 championship driver points and put on NASCAR probation until Dec. 31. Rick Hendrick, owner of the No. 24 car, has also been penalized with the loss of 25 championship owner points. Alan Gustafson, crew chief of the No. 24 car, was found to be in violation of Section 9-4A (at all events, crew chief assumes responsibility of his driver, car owner and team members) and has been placed on NASCAR probation until the end of the calendar year.

Bowyer’s crew chief Brian Pattie violated Sections 12-1 and 9-4A and has been fined $25,000 and placed on NASCAR probation until Dec. 31.

Rick Hendrick, owner of Hendrick Motorsports issued a statement:

I’ve always respected Jeff for standing his ground. We also respect that NASCAR needs to police the sport and send a message when situations like this occur. It’s been a great year, and we’re going to put our focus on finishing in a positive way this weekend.

Gordon added:

I take responsibility for my actions on the racetrack. I accept NASCAR’s decision and look forward to ending the season on a high note at Homestead.

Michael Waltrip Racing also issued a statement:

The goal of Michael Waltrip Racing is to be a championship-level organization both on and off the track. The on-track incident which occurred during Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Phoenix International Raceway was extremely disappointing and brought raw emotions of a long and hard championship battle to the surface. Though we generally cannot control certain actions on the track, the unfortunate reactions off the track Sunday did not live up to the professional standards in which Michael Waltrip Racing expects all of its representatives to live by. We commit to our sponsors, our manufacturer, our fans and NASCAR that we will do so in the future.

See the incident here:

With surgical precision, polesitter Jimmie Johnson triumphed at one of his best race tracks, gathering steam toward a sixth NASCAR Sprint Cup Series title while fending off a strong performance from his closest challenger for the championship.

Holding off Kyle Busch during a five-lap closing green-flag run at Martinsville Speedway, Johnson won Sunday’s TUMS Fast Relief 500 at the .526-mile short track and grabbed the series lead from sixth-place finisher Brad Keselowski.

Johnson’s fourth victory of the season and his seventh at Martinsville — tying him for third all-time with Rusty Wallace and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon — leaves the five-time Cup champion in a familiar position. Johnson holds a two-point lead over second-place Keselowski with three races left in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

“I’m ecstatic about the win today and ecstatic about the point lead, but this is no cakewalk,” Johnson said. “I feel as focused and as prepared as I’ve ever been. We have some very smart guys with experience on this team, and everybody is managing their emotions well and working very hard on their individual positions.

“Our young group of over-the-wall guys, they’re standing the test of time. They’re dealing with a lot of pressure each time on pit road and executing very well.”

Busch finished second, .479 seconds behind the driver of the No. 48 Chevrolet, who won for the 59th time in his career.

Kasey Kahne ran third, followed by Aric Almirola and Clint Bowyer. Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished 21st in his return to racing after a two-week hiatus. Earnhardt missed two races on doctor’s orders after sustaining his second concussion in six weeks Oct. 7 at Talladega.

Johnson had the lead on Lap 491 when a chain-reaction spin involving Sam Hornish Jr., Carl Edwards and Earnhardt caused the 11th caution and set up a restart on Lap 496.

For practical purposes, however, the winning move came on Lap 476 when Johnson and most of the other lead-lap cars opted to pit for tires under the 10th caution, caused by Kevin Harvick’s blown engine.

Keselowski and Earnhardt stayed on the track and led the field to the green flag on Lap 481. Earnhardt fell back immediately, but Keselowski stubbornly clung to the top spot until Johnson passed him on Lap 486.

“I think we’ve learned our lesson here in the past in not pitting late, and that certainly came into play, and we made the right decision there,” Johnson said.

Five laps after Johnson grabbed the lead, Hornish spun Edwards in Turn 2, and Edwards’ Ford slid into Earnhardt’s Chevrolet, knocking him out of the racing groove. After the restart on Lap 496, Busch got to Johnson’s bumper through Turns 1 and 2 on the final circuit, but deft driving on Johnson’s part kept Busch at bay.

“Jimmie did a good job,” Busch said. “He’s a five-time champion, six-time champion — probably six — for a reason. Getting into (Turn) 1, I got to his rear bumper. Didn’t want to move him out of the way. He slowed the corner down, protected the bottom.

“When I went back to the gas, I spun my tires and got loose, (and) he squirted away from me. No chance of getting back to him in 3 and 4. He manipulated my car the way he needed to protect himself for the last corner down there in 3 and 4.”

Denny Hamlin’s championship hopes sustained a crushing blow when his No. 11 suffered electrical problems late in the race. After intermittent losses of power, Hamlin’s car stalled on the frontstretch on Lap 391, causing the eighth caution of the race.

By the time his crew identified and fixed the problem — a broken post on the master cutoff switch — Hamlin was 34 laps down and mired in 33rdplace, his finishing position. Hamlin dropped from third to fifth in the standings, 49 points behind Johnson and all but out of contention for the title.

Johnson’s victory gave Chevrolet its 10th straight Cup manufacturers’ championship and 36th overall.

The team will also continue its deals with Roush Fenway Racing and Roush-Yates Engine.

The team still plans to field two Cup teams and a Nationwide team. RPM is working on re-signing Aric Almirola and Ambrose. Michael Annett should be back in the No. 43 N’Wide entry.

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Ambrose will now have Mike Ford atop the pit box, while Almirola will have Todd Parrott as his crew chief.

The goal of this move is to strengthen both teams.

RPM competition director Sammy Johns said:

We’re continuing to make improvements at Richard Petty Motorsports and we’ve added talented people to our organization this season. This move is to make sure that we are using that talent to the fullest to get the best results for our teams each weekend. We feel this adjustment will strengthen the organization, allow us to continue to compete for wins and ultimately challenge for championships.

Parrott said:

Aric has really shown the desire and dedication to get his first Sprint Cup Series win. It was great our team helped lead Marcos to his first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series win and poles. We are now ready to help direct Almirola and the #43 team to the same results and better.

Ford said:

Marcos is a racer who has proven to win poles and races. Our goal is to take my experiences and make sure we can consistently run up front and continue to win races.

In related news, FoxSports.com is reporting that RPM officials met with people from Richard Childress Racing about becoming a satellite organization to RCR, which would mean a switch from Ford to Chevy.

Team owner Richard Petty said:

No comment on anything because I don’t have a clue what’s going on. When we get everything squared away, we’ll talk to you. Other than that, there ain’t nothing. There ain’t nothing there ’til we bring something there, and right now we have nothing.

Taking advantage of Kyle Busch’s brush with the wall in the late going, pole-sitter Ty Dillon won going away in Friday night’s Jeff Foxworthy’s Grit Chips 200 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, the first victory for the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series rookie.

Busch ran second, 3.227 seconds behind the race winner. James Buescher finished third, followed by Parker Kligerman and Aric Almirola. Series leader Timothy Peters came home 13th.

Dillon, 20, grandson of team owner Richard Childress, is third in the standings, nine points behind Peters, as he tries to duplicate the NCWTS championship won by 22-year-old brother Austin Dillon last year.

“I’m just so happy for how hard we’ve worked,” said Ty Dillon. “It’s our rookie year, and we’re battling for the championship. My team doesn’t give up.

“Man, I’m just so happy and so excited. I finally won a NASCAR race. It’s been my whole life, and to finally do it means so much. Man, it’s awesome.”

Busch, Buescher (second in the standings, six points back) and Dillon swapped the lead between them eight times in a 25-lap stretch before Busch began to pull away. After a cycle of green-flag stops that started with Dillon’s trip down pit road on lap 82, Busch held a five-second lead, but a caution for debris on the backstretch on Lap 105 slowed the race and bunched the field.

Lead-lap trucks came to pit road on Lap 106, eliminating the need for fuel conservation the rest of the way. After a restart on Lap 110, Busch pulled away to a one-second lead as Dillon and Buescher battled for second behind him.

But Busch scraped the wall on the final run and damaged his truck, allowing Dillon to overtake him for the lead on Lap 125 of 130.

Busch said Dillon’s truck was simply better.

“He had a lot better handle on the bottom of the race track than we did, especially throughout the longer run,” Busch said. “He could hold the bottom better than I could. There, when it’s time to race, when a guy catches you, you’ve got to go somewhere else.

“You’ve got to go to the top, and you try to push and get sideways and hit the fence. There’s no room to catch it up there. It was all I could do to push it as hard as I could.”

Bad luck continued to haunt four-time champion Ron Hornaday Jr., still seeking his first victory since joining Joe Denette Motorsports at the end of the season. On Lap 37, contact from the truck of Tim George Jr. trapped Hornaday against the outside wall in a wreck that also collected Jason White’s Ford.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) proposed the amendment last year, and it failed. This year, however, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) took it up, and it passed. Kingston called cutting sports sponsorships a “great place to send a signal.”

Bill Young (R-Fla.) did not support the measure because he felt that the military should be visible in the community, but the amended passed on a voice vote.

Should this bill make it through the Senate, the teams that would be affected would be the No. 39 Stewart Haas Racing Chevy driven by Ryan Newman, which is sponsored by the U.S. Army;   the No. 43 Richard Petty Motorsports Ford driven by Aric Almirola, which will be sponsored by the U.S. Air Force at Charlotte Motor Speedway and Daytona International Speedway.

It is unclear whether or not the bill would affect the National Guard sponsorship, which appears on the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports Chevy driven by Dale Earnhardt Jr. Technically, the National Guard is not an armed force. It is a federally-recognized militia. That, however, may be a distinction without a difference.

The next step for the bill would be to be voted on by the House. If it passes, then it would move on to the Senate, where it would be assignment to a committee and voted on there. If it passes the Senate, then the differences between the House and Senate versions must be worked out before being sent back to the House and Senate for final approval.

Then it would head to the President for signing into law.

USA TODAY also reported the story.

Ford will join the team immediately, and will be atop the pit box starting at this weekend’s race at Talladega Superspeedway.

Ford has led the No. 11 Toyota to the Chase for the Sprint Cup in each of the last six seasons, and he has 17 wins to his credit as a crew chief, with 66 top 5s, and 108 top 10s.

There has been no word on what will happen to Erwin.

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In a Daytona 500 that featured the first postponement in its history, a ball of fire from a racecar vs. jet dryer collision under caution and a surfeit of wild action in the closing laps, Matt Kenseth won his second Daytona 500 when the tandem of Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Greg Biffle couldn’t catch the race winner in a green-white-checkered-flag finish.

Earnhardt made a slingshot move around Greg Biffle to run second in the 54th running of the Great American Race at Daytona International Speedway. Biffle came home third, followed by Denny Hamlin and Jeff Burton, as a late caution necessitated two extra laps beyond the scheduled 200.

Paul Menard, Kevin Harvick, pole-sitter Carl Edwards, Joey Logano and Mark Martin completed the top 10.

Earnhardt hooked up with Biffle and pushed the No. 16 Ford after a restart on Lap 201, but the pair could not make headway against Kenseth who moved to the front of the field and stayed there.

Earnhardt expected Biffle to pull out and make a move, but the move never came.

“I was waiting and waiting,” Earnhardt said. “It looked like he might have been trying to make a move on the back straightaway, but nothing materialized there. Then we came off (Turn) 4, and I kind of waited till the last minute for him to have his opportunity to try to pass Matt, and nothing was happening, so I just pulled out and went around him.”

Kenseth had plenty of power at the finish, despite problems with the cooling system that plagued him early in the race.

“We had a lot of problems — it was spewing water,” said Kenseth, who notched the 22nd NASCAR Sprint Cup victory of his career. “I have to give a lot of credit to (engine builder) Doug Yates and the guys at the engine shop. We had great horsepower.

“I could get a pretty good start on the bottom and either Denny or Dale Jr. could push me for a while and then they just couldn’t stay attached and I would get away from them just in time to get in front of Greg, and the two of us together could make some unbelievable speed. I have to thank Greg. We worked together really good all day long. He had a really fast car all day as well.”

A multicar wreck on Lap 188 thinned the herd considerably, taking out a handful of competitive cars. Jamie McMurray spun wildly near the entrance to Turn 1, and the chain-reaction collision wiped out the cars of Brad Keselowski, Kasey Kahne and Aric Almirola and damaged the machines of Edwards and Tony Stewart.

Another melee on Lap 196 set up the overtime. After contact from Joey Logano’s Toyota, the Ford of Ricky Stenhouse Jr. caromed into Stewart’s Chevrolet, turning the defending Cup champion sideways and igniting a pinball-style wreck that also involved Kyle Busch and Ryan Newman.

A strange weekend that saw the first weather postponement in the history of the Daytona 500 got downright bizarre during a round of pit stops under caution late in the race.

Juan Pablo Montoya brought his No. 42 Chevrolet to pit road under caution on Lap 160, complaining of transmission issues. His car fell victim to a strong vibration when he returned to the track, and Montoya slid out of control at the entrance to Turn 3 and slammed into a jet dryer, which was against the outside wall, blowing the track.

The collision ignited the jet fuel in the dryer and set both vehicles ablaze. Montoya and the driver of the service vehicle both escaped the wreckage, but the latter — Duane Barnes, from Michigan International Speedway — was taken to nearby Halifax Medical Center for further evaluation.

“Something failed in the rear of the car, and the car just spun into the jet dryer,” Montoya said after a visit to the care center. “I left the pits and felt a really weird vibration, and I came back in and checked the rear end and (they) said it was OK, and I got into the backstraight and we were going in fourth gear but wasn’t going that fast.

“Every time I got on the gas, I could feel the rear squeezing. When I was telling the spotter to have a look how the rear was moving, the car just turned right.”

NASCAR red-flagged the race as safety vehicles arrived on the scene and track workers attempted to put out the fire.

“There’s going to be a big speed bump heading into Turn 3,” crew chief Steve Letarte told Dale Earnhardt Jr., fearful that the blaze would melt the asphalt. “I will be shocked — shocked — if we can get this race restarted.”

Letarte was wrong.

Safety workers cleared the scene by hoisting the remains of the jet dryer on a tow truck with a boom to prevent further damage to the asphalt. After a stoppage of two hours, five minutes and 29 seconds, the event resumed just before midnight ET.

The race was barely one lap old when contact from the front bumper of Elliott Sadler’s Chevrolet turned the No. 48 Chevy of five-time champion Jimmie Johnson hard into the outside wall near the exit from the tri-oval.

Unable to avoid the wreck, David Ragan plowed into the side of Johnson’s car. Neither Johnson nor Ragan was able to continue; they retired from the race in the 42nd and 43rd positions, respectively.

The cars of defending race winner Trevor Bayne, Danica Patrick and Kurt Busch were severely damaged in the melee and all three headed to the garage for extensive repairs and later returned to the track.

“The steering’s off,” Patrick said, as she brought the No. 10 Chevy to pit road. Her crew repaired the rear suspension, but Patrick was 62 laps down when she reappeared on Lap 66. She wound up 38th in her Sprint Cup debut.

Notes: Martin Truex Jr. won the $200,000 bonus for leading the race at the halfway point . . . The top four drivers when Juan Montoya hit the jet dryer were Dave Blaney, Landon Cassill, Tony Raines and David Gilliland, none of whom had come to pit road with the rest of the lead-lap cars. Irreparable damage to the track or an ill-timed rain cell could have made a winner of Blaney. . . . Edwards and Kyle Busch had to restart from the rear when the race resumed for removing tear-offs from their windshields under the red flag.