Kyle Busch runs away from the field – again – in yet another dominating victory
By Mike Hembree - Associate Editor
Thursday, June 05, 2008
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Don’t look now, but the Kyle Busch Phenomenon is rampaging out of control. The man they call “Shrub” may shed that nickname like he kicks the competition – and calling it competition was being generous at Dover.
Busch, nicknamed “Shrub” because he’s the younger brother of 2004 champion Kurt Busch, turned the Dover International Speedway monster into Mini-Me in the Best Buy 400, leading the rest of the field to the finish by 4.22 seconds, scoring a season-high fourth victory of the year, leaving Roush Fenway Racing teammates moaning and groaning and, as icing on the cake, performing his postrace appear-from-smoke-burnout with near-perfection.
Of course, he’s had so much practice at burnouts this year that he can do them in his sleep. And that was what much of the Dover crowd was doing – sleeping. The race was far from a sellout, and there were imposing gaps in the stands long before the 400’s end as either the general lack of competition or Busch’s impending victory (or both) prompted thousands of spectators to stop spectating and hit the road.
Busch has a total of 10 wins in NASCAR’s top three series this season, and we’re barely into June. He leads the Cup points by 142. As the long, hot summer arrives, team owner Rick Hendrick, who let Busch escape to Joe Gibbs Racing only to see his own team held to only one victory to date, might begin driving himself a little batty.
There was only one on-track green-flag pass for the lead all day at Dover, and only the cars of Busch, second-place Carl Edwards and third-place Greg Biffle showed enough pizzazz to be considered victory contenders. Six other drivers led a few laps, but only the top three ran up front solidly, and Busch was clearly the best of that trio over the second half of the race. He led the final 74 laps and 155 of the final 164, all without even the hint of a challenge.
Biffle, who finished third, was as dominant early in the race as Busch would prove to be later. He led 164 of the first 170 laps but gave up the lead to Edwards when his car experienced alternator problems.
When he lost the lead, Biffle said, he all but lost hope. He took a shot at lapped traffic for holding up the lead group, and he said the car design made passing a car of equal stature nearly impossible.
“This car is so difficult,” Biffle said. “When you get 10 to 15 car lengths from a guy, it just stops, and you can’t get any closer. ... The car just slides. You go down in the corner, the front end slides up the race track. It won’t grab hold. Go to the gas, and it will be a little loose and start sliding the nose.
“Clean air is king. ... Whoever could get through traffic could just murder you.”
Busch and his Joe Gibbs Racing crew had a simple solution to that issue: Stay out front, and thus eliminate the problem. Run wild and free in the clean air where the going is great and the competition is nil. Perform crisp pit stops to keep potential challengers on the ropes.
“They did such a good job on pit road,” Busch said. “They were pretty phenomenal.”
Steve Addington, whose reputation along pit road has grown by leaps and bounds as Busch has emerged as a dominant Cup driver in a car that had struggled in previous seasons, said his crew clicked off pit stops in the 12-second range as a matter of course to keep Busch in a position of strength. On a day when passing was complicated and on a track that seemed to be more difficult to access than most for the new-model car, the lead was territory to be coveted.
“The way we got ahead was just great pit stops,” Addington said. “I think those guys busted off 12-second stops every time we were on pit road. I think that gave us a big advantage.”
Busch said he also experienced difficulty in moving past cars because of the new car’s attitude.
“There on that last pit stop, we came out of the pits behind [Martin] Truex, and I couldn’t pass him,” he said. “I rode behind the sixth-place car for 60 or 70 laps there and couldn’t get by him. I just had to run my own line, run my own pace, keep it glued to the bottom as best I could, just keep going through the corners and not get too loose [or] wear out the tires or anything like that.
“We’re all fighting for space. We’re all fighting for air. We’re all fighting for everything.”
There is the impression that Busch has jumped in the Gibbs Toyotas this year and driven every lap like it’s his last. After all, he has led 786 of them. But, clearly, his year has seen equal mixes of speed and savvy.
“You got to stay focused,” he said. “You got to keep your eyes ahead, keep your eyes on the same marks every time you’re going around the track. The car changes. It’s not just that you hit the same marks every time. You got to start backing off earlier. You got to start using a little bit more brake, trying to let the car roll around and do all that stuff. So it changes constantly.
“What you have to think of is, oh, that corner was a little bit too much brake. I can let it roll a little bit further next time. You just start changing everything the next time around, and you just got to keep judging off the cars around you and what your car is doing and stuff. It’s pretty hard to do.”
As for Edwards, the only other pretender to Busch’s throne, he left the track a very disappointed second and, while not vocal about it, also appeared to be miffed about slower traffic. He also complained about his pit service.
“I think over the day our car was the best, on average,” Edwards said. “We just didn’t put it all together. We weren’t fast enough at the end. One of the ways a fast car can get slowed down is pit stops. That happened to us today. I’m behind my guys a hundred percent. They work hard. We just got to get better there. That’s our weakest point right now with our team. That was what we struggled with most of the day. I don’t know if that was the deciding factor in our not winning the race.”
Edwards shadowed Busch for a while, but Busch pulled away after the last round of pit stops and was threatened by no one.
“I think my car had a bump stop that failed or something like that,” Edwards said. “My car felt pretty terrible there for the first 30 or 40 laps of that last run.”
Asked if he thought Busch was holding back power until the final laps, Edwards said no.
“Every time I passed him, he was working as hard as a guy could work in that car,” he said. “I could see it. I think it all just worked out in the best case for him and the worst case for us.”
Although Busch’s blistering run probably would have resulted in a win in any case, an early-race accident trimmed his opposition considerably.
Elliott Sadler started the incident on lap 18 by cutting down the track in front of David Gilliland. Contact between their cars sent Sadler spinning down the backstretch, igniting a major wreck. Among the drivers involved were Kasey Kahne, Denny Hamlin, Tony Stewart, Kevin Harvick, Clint Bowyer and Dale Earnhardt Jr. The Hamlin and Sadler cars were parked after the crunching incident, and Stewart eventually returned to action. The victory chances of Kahne, Harvick, Bowyer and Earnhardt Jr. were gone.
Sadler said he thought Gilliland clipped his car as they raced three-wide. Although he was involved secondarily, Stewart sarcastically took “100 percent responsibility” for the wreck, saying it was “my fault for being anywhere close to Elliott.”
NASCAR red-flagged the race for 16:13 to clear cars and debris from the backstretch.
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