On Saturday evening at the 0.686-mile O'Reilly Raceway Park, Kyle Busch held Carl Edwards off to win the Kroger 200. Interestingly, last week at Gateway International Raceway, Edwards dumped Brad Keselowski coming to the checkered flag, triggering a multicar accident and forcing NASCAR to penalize both drivers.

This time, Edwards raced Busch cleanly, and Busch grabbed his 38th career Nationwide Series victory, second only to Mark Martin on the all-time win list. Martin has 48 wins in the series.

Busch said the thought of Edwards roughing him up for the lead on a green-white-checkered did enter his mind, and he did all he could to avoid trouble.

"I wasn't going to move Kyle out of the way," Edwards said. "I inadvertently got into him just a little off of [Turn] 4 one time. Fortunately, it didn't cause damage to either of our cars. But, no, I couldn't move him out of the way. We've raced really well together. We've had one of the best races I've ever had in my life last year here. This probably feels like a better race to him because he won, but the one I won last year and that was one of the coolest races I've had. It seems like we've really raced well together the last couple years, and I enjoy that."

Edwards and some others on the lead lap pitted for fresh tires on Lap 162, with Edwards restarting 11th with 28 laps to go. Edwards sliced through the top 10 to get to second, and a caution came out with six laps to go.

"I thought it was an opportunity, but [Busch] got me on the restart. His tires were 30 laps older, and somehow he was able go as fast as he was going," Edwards said. "I think if we didn't get the caution, it was going to be really interesting with lapped traffic. But my hat's off to those guys.

"We didn't have any chance of winning that race without those new tires. Crew chief Drew Blickensderfer took the tires, and it gave us a shot to win. I can't complain about that."

On the green-white-checkered restart, which took the race one lap beyond its posted distance, Busch got the jump on Edwards into Turn 1, though Edwards tried to get to the inside lane on the white flag lap and on the final lap. But Busch was up to the task.

"It was good, hard, clean racing," said Busch, who led four times for 144 of the 201 laps. "That's what happens when you race guys cleanly over time and race each other with respect -- you get respect back."