Over his career at Bristol, Kyle Busch has amassed five Sprint Cup Series wins – with the last coming in 2011. Last year, Busch was able to finish second in the spring race, before finishing 11th in the fall race.
“It’s been a real good place for me in years past — not quite as good the last couple years and we would certainly like to change that around a little bit and get back to our old winning ways here with our Skittles Camry,” Busch commented. “Put the rainbow in victory lane. Looking forward to what the race is going to have in store for us here Sunday and if anything has changed from last year, which I doubt, then we’ll all be running up top and trying to figure out the new, old, old, new Bristol.”
With the current configuration, drivers have gotten used to running the top line around Bristol, rather than the bottom. As a result, Busch feels that it has made passing harder.
“ You run into the corner and you try to move a guy out of the way and when you hit him there’s really not room for him to slide up and you’re already going left, you can’t just turn farther left,” he explained. “If we could then we would all be running around here faster. Essentially when you run the bottom, you could go in the corner and hit a guy, he would move out of the way and you would roll on through. You can’t roll in the corner, hit a guy, cut underneath him and pass him.”
Busch says that now Bristol has taken a whole new attitude to how you have to race the event, mostly single-file around the top with slide jobs happening every now and then.
“It’s certainly more challenging or a bigger challenge than what it used to be and it’s just a different form of racing than what it used to be,” Busch continued. “It’s something we’ve all become accustomed to here the last few times especially that the top is the way to go because when they ground the top they tried to ruin the top and they actually helped it more than the bottom because they smoothed it out and once you get rubber developed up there and once you get the rubber laid down up there, it’s actually faster than the bottom.”
If Busch can figure it out come Sunday and lead some laps, it’ll put him closer to having led 10,000 laps in the series. Busch has led 92,809 laps over the course of the past 11 years.
“It’s pretty neat you know anytime we’re able to set records, break records, math — however you want to say it. It’s always fun,” he commented. “It just means you’re accomplishing things in the sport, various things in the sport. There’s a lot of things that I want to accomplish still that I haven’t. Whatever things come along that way that we’re able to accomplish is awesome, it’s fun, it’s great — it means you are a namesake in the sport and that hopefully things continue to go down that path.”
Last weekend, Busch didn’t have the success that he wanted as he finished just outside the top 10. Busch attributes that to the new rules and other teams figuring it out quicker than his Joe Gibbs Racing team.
“I don’t think it’s anything to do with the aero rules, I think it’s just to do with the new ride height rules,” Busch commented. “The box used to be so big and now it’s way bigger. It just allows more opportunity for teams to experiment and to come up with different things that make their cars go fast.”
Like last weekend at Vegas, Busch will once again be running the Nationwide Series race this weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway. Busch says the motivation behind running in the series is sponsorship dollars as Monster Energy pays a lot of money for him to be in the car.
“If I didn’t have those guys, then I’m not so sure that they would feel confident being in the sport whatsoever,” Busch explained. “At least it’s another team that’s out there that’s running around and is in business. It’s not necessarily just for me, but there’s 16 or 17 guys on that team with the 54 car that have jobs because of that sponsor.”
