Kahne — who finished seventh in the Sprint Cup Series on Saturday and third in the Nationwide Series on Friday at Texas Motor Speedway — surged to the front in the 155th lap of 200 to notch his fourth win in five starts in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series.

James Buescher finished second with Matt Crafton third and Johnny Sauter fourth. Timothy Peters jumped into the series’ points lead with a combination of a fifth-place finish and an early wreck for teammate John King, the Daytona winner who led the points coming in.

Brad Sweet qualified the No. 4 truck fifth, but Kahne had to start at the rear of the field because of the driver change. Even with traveling from Fort Worth overnight, getting approximately 4 1/2 hours of sleep and having no track time in preparation for the race, Kahne was poised to pounce in the late stages.

“This is probably the best weekend I’ve had in a long time,” Kahne said. “I got out of that truck and I’ve got three clean race cars and I ran three hard races this weekend, and everything’s clean — not a dent on ‘em. . . . It was a good weekend, tons of energy, and I’ll sleep good tonight when I finally decide to go to bed.”

Kahne played a prominent part in NASCAR’s last race here, when Matt Kenseth edged him at the line for a Sprint Cup Series victory. The memory of that race was on his mind when he returned to the mile oval.

“I’ve watched it on video and I can run it through my head and remember so many things about how that race finished,” Kahne said. “Those are kind of the memories that I have.”

Until now. Kahne withstood Buescher’s last-ditch effort on a restart with 20 laps left and had nowhere near as close a finish as last time around. Kahne was a comfortable 1.478 seconds ahead at the checkered flag.

Pole-starter Nelson Piquet Jr. — Kahne’s next-closest competition — dominated the early stages of the race, leading 85 of the race’s first 100 laps. But Piquet became mired in traffic after a lengthy pit stop shuffled him back to fifth during the third of the race’s four cautions.

He worked his way back to second place until incurring a pit-road speeding penalty during the final caution period. He rallied to finish seventh.

John King’s grasp on the series’ points lead fizzled early in the race, when he spun and nosed into the inside wall on the backstretch on Lap 4 to bring out the race’s first caution. King returned to the track after repairs, but wound up completing 56 laps and finishing 33rd, dropping him seven spots to eighth in the standings.

The first two came on rural short tracks in Virginia. The third was a shocker — Friday night’s improbable victory in the NextEra Energy Resources 250 at Daytona International Speedway.

It took three attempts at a green-white-checkered-flag finish for King to win his first NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race in his eighth start in the series and his first on a superspeedway.

King was in the lead in the third overtime when Joey Coulter’s Chevrolet flew into the catch fence on the frontstretch after James Buescher’s Chevy turned sideways from contact with the truck of Ron Hornaday Jr. Coulter walked away from the wreck.

The resulting caution froze the field and made a winner of King, who still seemed amazed at his accomplishment when he talked to reporters after the race.

“This is feature win No. 3 for me — in my whole career,” King said. “It’s unbelievable. I couldn’t imagine being here, and we’re here.”

A hard crash on Lap 104 — four laps into overtime at the 2.5-mile track — took out race leader Johnny Sauter, who turned into the outside wall in the tri-oval off the bumper of King, igniting a multicar melee behind them.

“Golly, I flat freakin’ wrecked him,” King lamented on his radio after NASCAR red-flagged the race to clean up debris from the wreck.

Five laps and an 11-minute stoppage later, after a torrent of reassuring words from crew chief Chad Kendrick, King was in victory lane. Timothy Peters, King’s Red Horse Racing teammate came home second. Justin Lofton was credited with a third-place finish, followed by Travis Kvapil and Jason White.

“All I know was, the closing rate was real fast, and I couldn’t get off of him,” King said of the contact with Sauter’s car. “I’m a rookie, and I’ve never pushed (another car in the draft) in my life, and this is my first time at Daytona Speedway or any superspeedway.

“I apologize to him from the bottom of my heart. It wasn’t my intention at all.”

A caution on Lap 61 for a crash involving John King, Cale Gale and Mike Skinner provided a window for drivers to make their final pit stops. The trip down pit road failed to break up the dominant combination of Turner Motorsports drivers Buescher and polesitter Miguel Paludo.

Nelson Piquet Jr., the third of the Turner drivers, took the lead soon after a restart on Lap 69, and the Turner Chevrolets ran 1-2-3 as the race closed in on the 75-lap mark. To that point, Turner drivers had led every green-flag lap.

Lap after lap they maintained that order, Piquet leading Paludo and Buescher, all three trucks hugging the yellow line at the bottom of the track until White led a surge in the outside lane and grabbed the lead from Paludo on Lap 84.

As the trucks approached the stripe on that circuit, Paludo’s Chevy turned sideways and slammed nose-first into the inside wall, bring an abrupt end to the Turner triumvirate.

White led the field to the subsequent restart on Lap 91, with Piquet in second, Sauter third and Buescher fourth. White stayed out front until Parker Kilgerman’s Dodge spun sideways on Lap 95, scattering the back half of the field and damaging the trucks of David Starr, Ross Chastain, Dusty Davis and Bryan Silas.

Notes: Ward Burton finished eighth in his first start in any of NASCAR’s top three series since 2007… Paulie Harraka, who triggered an early wreck, got five straight “lucky dogs” (free passes to regain lost laps) as the highest-scored lapped car. He finished 19th in his first start in the series.