page_title: 2010 Air Guard 400
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: 2010 Air Guard 400 / Report / Background
caption_attribution_description: Sitting in the suites at RIR September 9th 2007 RICHMOND, Va. Kyle Busch led four times and for all but 25 laps and even made overtime look easy at Richmond International Raceway on Friday night, earning his ninth career NASCAR Busch Series victory and second of the season. Picture by Sherry Lambert
context_page_description: The 2010 Air Guard 400 was a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series stock car race that was held on September 11, 2010 at Richmond International Raceway in Richmond, Virginia. Contested over 400 laps, it was the twenty-sixth and final race leading into the Chase for the Sprint Cup in the 2010 Sprint Cup Series season. Denny Hamlin won the race for the Joe Gibbs Racing team; his teammate, Kyle Busch, finished second while Jimmie Johnson clinched third.
  Carl Edwards won the pole position, holding the lead until lap 51 when Johnson passed him. Hamlin, however, was the dominant driver for most of the race, taking the lead on lap 110 and leading the most laps throughout the race. There were three cautions and fourteen lead changes among six different drivers throughout the course of the race.
  It was Hamlin's sixth win of the season and the fifteenth of his career. The result of having six wins moved him into first in the Drivers' Championship, ten points ahead of Johnson and thirty ahead of Kevin Harvick to begin the 2010 Chase for the Sprint Cup.
context_section_description: Richmond International Raceway is one of five short tracks to hold NASCAR races; the others are Bristol Motor Speedway, Dover International Speedway, Martinsville Speedway, and Phoenix International Raceway. The NASCAR race makes use of the track's standard configuration, a four-turn short track oval that is 0.75 miles (1.21 km) long. The track's turns are banked at fourteen degrees; the front stretch, the location of the finish line, is banked at eight degrees while the back stretch has two degrees of banking.
  Before the race, Kevin Harvick led the Drivers' Championship with 3,585 points, and Jeff Gordon followed in second with 3,366 points. Kyle Busch was third in the Drivers' Championship with 3,325 points, Tony Stewart was fourth with 3,302 points, and Carl Edwards was fifth with 3,288 points. Five additional drivers had clinched spots in the Chase—in order of placement, Jeff Burton, Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, Matt Kenseth, and Denny Hamlin. Greg Biffle, who was 11th in the standings with 3,110 points, needed only a finish of 42nd place in the race to secure his spot in the Chase. Clint Bowyer, in the final Chase spot of 12th in the standings with 3,066 points, clinched his spot with a race finish of 28th or better. In the Manufacturers' Championship, Chevrolet was leading with 182 points, thirty-two points ahead of their rival Toyota. Ford, with 116 points, was fourteen points ahead of Dodge in the battle for third. Hamlin was the race's defending champion.
  This race was also historic in that it was sponsored by the Air National Guard. Going into the race, Col. Mary Salcido, director of recruiting and retention for the Air National Guard, expressed excitement in the opportunity to meet the organization's recruitment goals: "With NASCAR having one of the largest fan bases next to the NFL, the marketing and number of people that an event like this reaches are in the millions. This allows the public to see that the National Guard is a two-pronged force, and anytime you can get that message out is a good thing."
caption: Richmond International Raceway, the race track where the race was held.
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