Penske Racing's Kurt Busch ready to challenge Hendrick Motorsports for Cup supremacy in 2010

By Mike Hembree - Associate Editor

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Penske Racing's Kurt Busch finished fourth in the final 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings.

Sam Cranston
NASCAR Scene

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Rate Kurt Busch as “best in class” for the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup season.

Hendrick Motorsports drivers Jimmie Johnson, Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon finished one-two-three in the 2009 championship race, so the first driver in the standings without a Hendrick affiliation was Busch, who turned good runs in the Chase into a fourth-place finish in points.

Busch figures that finish can be built upon in 2010 despite changes at Penske Racing. With the departure of crew chief Pat Tryson, now at Michael Waltrip Racing, Busch will be working with a new pit boss, and the Penske organization will be under new pressure as the only Dodge operation in Sprint Cup.

The target for 2010? It’s an easy one for Busch: the Hendrick juggernaut.

“They’re our goal,” he says. “We want to achieve greatness just as they did. There are three guys who we were competing against all year. Those three just seem to have something different than the rest of the competition.

“For us to be ‘first in class,’ it’s a little bit of a feather in our cap. We felt like we competed at the best of our ability, but yet they taught us enough to know to where we can compete and go for the championship in 2010.”

A not-yet-named new crew chief will mark a fresh start of sorts for Busch, who had an impressive 2009 – two wins, 21 top-10s – despite Tryson’s lame-duck status.

“We have all of our cars torn down at the shop sitting there waiting for the direction,” Busch says. “We still have a little time to find the right guy.”

Busch, who won the 2004 Cup championship, says Penske is moving along in a process of coordinating the preparation of all three Sprint Cup cars, including those of drivers Brad Keselowski and Sam Hornish Jr.

“It has been exciting to watch the newness and the change, and that’s one of the reasons why Pat Tryson decided he needed to go elsewhere – because of those changes,” Busch says. “I have a full commitment to our engineering staff and everybody that’s running that program. You always have to find driver input and put it into the cars, but you always have to have a structure that takes it in a direction that’s positive and that everybody is believing in.”

New driver-crew chief combinations sometimes work immediately; others take months – maybe longer – to produce positive results. In Busch’s view, the difference between the two situations is communication.

“It’s the willingness to work together and set aside differences or egos,” he says. “And opinions. What it gets down to is the car’s handling on the race track and how that driver communicates it to the crew chief. I can only speak from the driver’s side, but sometimes it clicks right away, and there’s no definition for it. Sometimes you struggle for a certain amount of time. There are reasons why that happens.

“But you always hope for the best scenario, which is to have success right away and to move forward. That’s what happened with me and Pat Tryson and with Jimmy Fennig [when Busch drove for Roush Fenway Racing]. That’s what you look for.”