Penske Racing's Kurt Busch balancing new competitiveness, off-track commitments

By Rea White - Associate Editor
Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Kurt Busch has been a busy man of late.

Not only is the Penske Racing driver enjoying renewed success in the NASCAR Sprint Cup ranks, but he has also been in high demand at a variety of events showing his range and versatility outside of the car. While some might struggle to balance the demands of being a competitive NASCAR Cup driver with the other encroachments on one's time that roll creates, Busch seems to have found a way to meld the two perfectly.

After all, just look at the season he's enjoying. Busch and his Pat Tryson-led team have a newfound level of success together. Busch looks more like the driver who won the 2004 title, not the one who labored to finishes of 18th and 16th in the last three seasons. Busch has finished in the top 10 in two of the last four seasons as well, but hasn't been in position to challenge for the championship.

Now, after an offseason of hard work and a season of smart calls and moves, he is. Does he feel the pressure of his return to top status and his consistent stay in the top-five in the point standings as the Chase For The Sprint Cup nears?

Apparently not. After all, just look at his recent schedule.

Mixed in with the races have been some unusual appearances and personal side trips. For example, Busch recently planned to go  hunting in Montana with Darius Songaila of the Washington Wizards, one of his neighbors. But he didn't just plan to fly out to the site. Instead, he planned a trip that included a plane ride, a 90-minute drive and a three-hour donkey ride.

While in California for the road-course race at Infineon, he took time to participate in a taping of “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” His response after the filming: “Yeah, I guess they proved that I’m not."

So clearly, his sense of humor is intact. So, too, it seems is his team. They're becoming increasingly consistent in their runs and avoiding some of the bad luck that is dogging others. Busch has a pair of top-five finishes in his most recent races and three in the last four.

Busch has been in the top five in the standings since the season's second race. He's now fourth overall, 305 points behind leader Tony Stewart, and is looking like one of the sleepers in the field with seven races to go before the field for the Chase is set.

The team is quietly gaining ground with the cars it has built and tested over the course of the season. This weekend's race at Chicagoland Speedway, for instance, will see the team bringing one of its latest incarnations of the new-model Cup car.

“This is another one of our latest-edition race cars, and it should be a good fit for Chicago,” crew chief Tryson said. “Darlington was a learning experience for us with this car (Busch finished 16th). We missed on the setup and know what the remedy was. I’m very optimistic about our chances to be very competitive at Chicago this weekend.”

Busch certainly hopes so. He loves Chicago. It’s where his parents grew up and a place the Las Vegas native still has many family members. He’s a diehard Chicago Cubs fan as well.

“Probably what sealed the deal as for my love for Chicago was back when I was just 6 years old and we went back to visit my grandfather, who lived right in the city,” Busch said. “We went to Lake Michigan, to the Sears Tower, to the Lincoln Park Zoo – all over the place. It made such a tremendous impression on me. Living in Las Vegas, we never saw anything like that back then.”

Now, he hopes no one has seen the likes of his run to the end of the season.

As he looks over his Penske team’s evolution with the new car, Busch sees a lot of changes. Chief among them is the number of cars the team is using to attack the season now.

“It's something to where we were behind the scenes thinking that we were going to be fine with this new car, yet we got hit with a steamroller when we debuted it basically in 2008 full time,” Busch says. “So it has been a learning curve. We anticipated here at Penske Racing we could have just a few cars in our stable and take these cars that were more universal to all the different styles of tracks.

“And basically what it has gotten down to is the quantity of cars have gone back up, cars have taken on their own identity for specific racetracks. The fact that like today, I was sitting down looking at our notes from last year's Chicagoland race, we just wadded it up and threw it in the trash can because we've changed everything.”

Busch, now 30 and perhaps in better position to appreciate a championship run than he was in 2004 with the team then known as Roush Racing, his fourth full time season in the Cup series, admits that it’s nice to be back among the sport’s elite.

But he still wants more out of his races.

“It's great to be back on top,” he says. “It's satisfying to run consistent.  We've had some tough days and we've turned those into good, solid finishes. That's what a championship team does.

“But right now we need to start pushing a little harder and crack victory lane a few more times and take those bonus points with us to the Chase.”

As he looks down the road, Busch expects the same contenders to come into play each week. Although a wider slate of drivers have won races this year, he expects to continue to battle the sport’s top multicar organizations for titles and race wins down the stretch.

He’s just glad that his is back among those.

“I feel like you're still going to have the same group of guys accumulating the wins,” he says. “What I think it gets down to is just your core teams, Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, Roush [Fenway] Racing, Penske, those are the top guys right now that are in the top 12. You've got [Earnhardt Ganassi Racing’s] Juan Montoya knocking on the door. You have [Michael Waltrip Racing’s] David Reutimann knocking on the door.

“There's going to be that group that gets separated. I think it still sticks with the powerhouse teams that have a shot at the championship.”
 

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2009 Sprint Cup Race for the Chase Standings

Driver Standings after the AMP Energy 500

1 Jimmie Johnson 6248
2 Mark Martin -184
3 Jeff Gordon -192
4 Juan Pablo Montoya -239
5 Tony Stewart -279
6 Kurt Busch -312
7 Greg Biffle -340
8 Ryan Newman -402
9 Kasey Kahne -414
10 Carl Edwards -437
11 Denny Hamlin -448
12 Brian Vickers -556

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