Busch has had some Talladega success

By Mike Mulhern
Media General News Service
Published: October 3, 2008

TALLADEGA, Ala. - Remember Kyle Busch?

He was so far ahead of the rest of the NASCAR field for most of the season that the championship seemed almost assured.

But now….

With three bad finishes - 34th, 43rd and 28th - in the first three playoff races, Busch is out of it already.

He had a sway-bar chassis problem at Loudon, an engine problem at Dover and another engine problem at Kansas.

So coming into Sunday’s Amp Energy 500, the tour’s once-hottest driver has gone stone cold, and he’s now 12th and last in the Chase standings, an amazing 311 points down to leader Jimmie Johnson.

It’s a stunning turnaround. And it shows very clearly how NASCAR’s “Chase” system of determining the series champion is badly flawed.

And it’s not even clear that the Chase system works at pumping up TV ratings.

On top of Busch’s precipitous fall is Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s faltering at the starting gate for the Chase.

Now Earnhardt may win Sunday’s 500 - and not just because it’s sponsored by the same Pepsi division - Amp - that also sponsors Earnhardt’s race team.

This track has been an Earnhardt playground.

Well, until lately. Earnhardt’s last win here was in 2004. Since then he’s finished 15th, 40th, 31st, 23rd, seventh, 40th…and 10th last spring.

So the pick Sunday could be - Busch. Remember, Busch was the driver to beat in the Daytona 500, finishing fourth. He won Talladega in April, and he won Daytona in July, beating Carl Edwards. In the year’s three restrictor-plate races, Busch has two wins and a fourth, and he leads in laps led, with 129.

Too bad he comes here all but out of title contention.

“There’s no way we would have ever envisioned this happening,“ Busch said of his sudden run of bad luck.

“The goal now is just to get back to what we were doing at the beginning of the year and just go for wins. That’s all we can do.

“I believe in my guys, and they believe in me. Nothing has changed there.

“It’s just been a run of bad luck. It’s just too bad it happened to us.

“I would probably be more frustrated getting wrecked by other drivers or screwing up and ruining the chance for the team. But this is stuff that has happened out of everyone’s control.

“It’s just bad luck.

“I don’t know where it came from.

“It has been a stressful few weeks, devastating and disappointing. But you just have to keep going.

“These guys have done a great job of putting together some great cars. Unfortunately, here the start of the chase it has been tough.

“All we can do is work at winning a couple before the year is out and finishing up the year and focusing on a 2009 championship.

“It’s just like anything in sports: getting into a rhythm.

“Maybe it’s a quarterback who has the best passer-rating three games in a row, or a receiver who has a touchdown streak. It’s been that way for us this year.

“So I’ve considered myself fortunate to still have the year we’ve had.

“It was Richmond where it all got derailed. We just haven’t had the finishes we’ve wanted since then.

“You’ve got to keep the team upbeat and get that momentum back on your side.

“I don’t know exactly what we need to do to get it back, but I know our guys will keep working hard, and I’ll keep driving the wheels off it.“

Busch’s luck at Talladega has been miserable until he signed on with Joe Gibbs and got Mark Cronquist’s engines.

Toyota engines have been strong at plate tracks, obviously. “It helped power us up through the field when we were getting bumped and banged all over the place,“ Busch said of the spring breakout. “I felt pretty fortunate to win, because it’s just been a struggle for as long as I’ve been going here.

“I don’t think I’ve ever finished one without some sort of damage.“

On the plus side, with the winged car, the wing seems to make the car more stable. “We really haven’t seen that big wreck with the new car that we had with the old car,“ Busch said.

“With the old cars, we could bump draft each other through the corners.

“With these cars, they are the same way, but the rear bumpers are high and front bumpers are low, so we are able to bump draft all the way through the corner and build up a lot of speed all the way around.

“When you have two guys who know what they are doing, and keep their cars straight, and you don’t hit somebody too hard, it really works, and you can use it to your advantage.“

Well, maybe Busch’s newfound good luck at Talladega can help him out of this big championship hole.

“We’ve never really had great luck at Talladega until the first race there this year,“ he said. “It had been my worst race track as far as catching a break.

“The key is to somehow stay out of trouble.

“In that race you pretty much stay around the bottom, since there is a lot of grip there, and you can pretty much run wide open every single lap.

“Everyone can run up on top of each other. And when you get single file at the bottom, sometimes it’s hard to get into a line on the outside with enough good cars to get something going. It can be frustrating at times because of that.

“But it also seems to still put on a good race.

“If you can be a contender and stay in line on the bottom, you can make it a pretty easy and safe race.“

But with as many drivers with jobs on the line, it probably won’t be quite as easy and safe this time around as it was in the spring.

Maybe Busch can play that to his advantage.

Mike Mulhern can be reached at .