Busch: Racing at Martinsville takes patience, strategy
By SceneDaily Staff
Friday, March 28, 2008
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MARTINSVILLE, Va. – NASCAR drivers are used to close-quarters, tight racing. But at Martinsville, where it often seems like cars are only separated by the length of a toothpick, driving requires a bit of a different mindset.
“This is one of the toughest tracks to find your own space, because there are so many cars and somebody’s always on top of you,” Penske Racing driver Kurt Busch said Friday at Martinsville. “It’s hard to protect your race car. The thing you just have to do at Martinsville is know that you’re in it for 500 laps and that you can’t get in too big of a hurry in the early portion of the race because anything can happen.”
Busch said drivers must play a game of politics while racing at Martinsville. If a bad pit stop knocks his car back to 15th or 20th place,
Busch said, he’ll need to work his way back up through the field.
But carefully, he said.
“If you do it in too much of a hurry and then you have another problem, those drivers won’t necessarily be all that easy to pass the next time,” he said, adding that after the final pit stop, “You have to have been friendly enough to those guys up front so that you can go and maneuver your way through them if you have a fast car to do it.”
Busch is among those who paid attention to Jeff Gordon’s effort to get by Jimmie Johnson on the last lap of the Martinsville race one year ago. Gordon hit Johnson hard to try to move him out of the way, but learned that the new cars aren’t as easy to bump as the old ones.
“You hope with this new car that you don’t completely have to annihilate him to move him out of the way and to go onto victory,” Busch said. “…What we haven’t seen is the old bump-and-run. Who knows who can be the one to pull that off the first time and do it successfully?”
- Mentioned Drivers:
- Kurt Busch
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