Tom Jensen's dirty dozen takeaways from STP 500

Sunday's STP 500 at Martinsville Speedway was a glorious affair to behold, with lots of passing and hard racing throughout the field and chamber of commerce spring weather in Southern Virginia.
Kyle Busch, who had gone from 2005 to 2015 never winning on the 0.526-mile paperclip, had a huge weekend, sweeping both Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race and the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race on Saturday.
Here are my dozen takeaways from the sixth race of the 2016 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season.
12. Not the usual suspects -- At the end of the race, neither Hendrick Motorsports nor Stewart-Haas Racing had a single driver finish in the top five. Second through fourth place were occupied instead by AJ Allmendinger, Kyle Larson and Austin Dillon. Good to see some new faces up front.
11. Everybody makes mistakes -- Pre-race favorite and five-time Martinsville winner Denny Hamlin had a great Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota but made a rookie mistake and wheel-hopped his car right into the fence on Lap 221, an unforced error that knocked him out of the race. Remember that the next time you have a fender bender in your family car.
10.The wrong direction -- Remember the old line about "the first one now will later be last?" That pretty much sums up the front row. Pole-winner Joey Logano struggled to finish 11th, while second qualifier Kasey Kahne had yet another poor result, finishing 22nd. Kahne remains the season's biggest enigma.
9. One lane only -- Dale Earnhardt Jr. summed up the last restart succinctly and correctly: "What do you do? If you can't start in the inside you are screwed." Yep. Just about everyone who re-started on the outside on Lap 490 finished worse than they ran.
8. If it wasn't for bad luck -- Matt Kenseth would have no luck at all this season. The 2003 champion led the Daytona 500 on the last lap and Sunday at Martinsville was second on the aforementioned final restart. He finished 14th at Daytona and 15th in the STP 500, the fifth time in six races he hasn't finished in the top 10.
7. Consolation prize -- If you look at Earnhardt's finish, you'd say 14th wasn't very good. But according to NASCAR loop data, NASCAR most popular driver made more green-flag passes than anyone in the field.
6. On the way back -- All three Richard Childress drivers finished in the top 10, with Dillon fourth, Paul Menard eighth and Ryan Newman 10th. I can't even remember the last time that happened.
5. Why they race -- Both Kyles -- Busch and Larson -- ran in the Truck Series race on Saturday. Busch won the Cup race and Larson finished third, the best Martinsville Cup results either driver had. And that's exactly why Cup drivers moonlight in the lower series -- to get better on Sunday.
4. Lots of firsts -- Seven of the top-10 drivers Sunday had their best finishes of the season, including winner Kyle Busch. Seeing the obvious joy in Busch, Allmendinger, Larson and others was one of the highlights of the day.
3. Diversity -- Six Sprint Cup races so far this year have produced five different winning drivers, four different winning teams, three victories for Chevrolet, two for Toyota and one for Ford. That's a great mix.
2. Low downforce rules -- If you would have told me before the race that the leader would be out front for 352 of 500 laps, I would have said the race sucked. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yeah, Busch held the point for most of the day, but there were tremendous battles all over the track. The new low-downforce package -- and tires that work with it -- have made the racing the best it's been in years.
1. Busch's best yet to come -- Here's a scary piece of trivia for you: Kyle Busch's last three victories -- the Brickyard 400, Homestead and Martinsville -- have all come at tracks where he'd never won before. Having figured out how to harness and focus his prodigious talents, Busch in now scary good and seemingly getting better. Be afraid, be very afraid.
