After being beaten in the XFINITY Series race the day before on the final lap, Kyle Busch’s run of poor finishes continued today in the Irish Hills as his engine let go and caught fire early in the race.
Even after coming down pit road under the first caution of the race, the driver of the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota continued to report that temperatures were still climbing and that the engine was about to blow.
“At least I had a 30 lap warning that it was coming,” Busch said. “It had been shaking pretty bad and going south for a while and it had been building its own heat.”
Coming down the backstretch on lap 54, the engine blew up and the underside of his car caught fire. He took the car behind the wall and retired from the race.
“Just been feeling the motor kind of going south for about 30 laps or so and finally let go,” he said. “At least there was plenty of warning and I knew it was going to get hot in there and it certainly did once it let go and it was on fire. It’s just been a dismal month, just haven’t been able to hit anything and get good finishes going.
“Our car has been really fast and Adam (Stevens, crew chief) and the guys have been doing a great job getting us good stuff to the race track, but it just wasn’t our day today. Again, this is six in a row here. We started out the season good and strong and had some top-fives and such so it was a good foundation for us to build off of and fortunately we have all that and this is just a continuation of hurting us in the points, but points don’t matter. We’d like to be able to get out luck turned around and get back to finishing races where we know we can.”
Since scoring his third victory of the season at Kansas Speedway, Busch has had finishes of 30th, 33rd, 31st and 40th.
“There’s nothing you can do to change it around, you’re not going to go to the luck store and buy any,” he said of his string of bad finishes. “We had a lot of good fortune go our way at the beginning part of the season I guess. We still had blown tires that hurt us, but we’re either top-four or we’re bottom four. There is no absolute in between for us.”
Busch also finished last in this race one year ago. This makes him the first driver to do so since Mike Bliss at New Hampshire in 2013 and 2014.
He leaves Michigan ninth in points as NASCAR heads to Sonoma Raceway, the track that was the catalyst to his championship run last season.
