KYLE BUSCH, No. 18 Pedigree Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
Could you tell the problem was serious?
“Oh yeah, it just kept getting worse and worse the more the day was going, especially after restarts it was really, really bad, so I was just trying to bide it out, see if we’d make it to the end. At first, I thought that it was an engine problem, but that wasn’t the case. It was certainly in the drivetrain – something else. You know, this isn’t very popular of a failure for us, so we have an idea – I already know what was wrong – but we’ve got to go back to the shop and kind of diagnose and figure out why it was wrong and kind of go from there. The Pedigree Camry was good – it was top-three car. I felt like barring some different clean air circumstances, you know, and different restart lines and stuff, I felt like I could get up there and race with the 4 (Kevin Harvick) or the 2 (Brad Keselowski), but as bad as that vibration kept getting throughout the race there it was just too hard to handle and finally it threw the shifter knob off the shifter and there was – even when it broke, I could just push the clutch in. I couldn’t even grab the shifter in order to get it knocked out of gear or anything like that. It was so hard – still vibrating so badly. We’ll go on to next week.”
When could you tell you had an issue?
“Yeah, just we started the race with it unfortunately and it just kept getting worse and worse as the day was going. I don’t know why we started the race with it – we hadn’t had anything like that in a long, long time. I know what it was, but not sure why we had the problem to begin with, so, you know, we had a really fast Pedigree Camry. I thought we were going to be top-three car for sure – no question about that – but then what was going to happen with the guys in front of us. I felt like if we could have jumped them In track position, maybe we could have done something better about keeping the clean air and keeping the lead and stuff like that, but it just got so bad there that last run vibrating it even blew the shifter ball off the shifter and when it finally broke, I couldn’t even grab the shifter in order to knock it out of gear so I could just push the clutch in, so I had to nurse it back and get out of everybody’s way.”
Were you saying this is a somewhat common problem?
“No, it was not a popular problem. We’ve never had that problem before. Just I know what it was, but I don’t know why we had it, so we’ll have to go back to the shop and diagnose it, try to figure it out. It’s kind of weird. We’ve had issues like that in practices before and we’ve been able to figure it out early enough to not have the problem in the race, but this weekend we never had that issue at all until the race started, so felt weird about how that went down.”
When you feel a vibration are you trying to asses it in the moment?
“I definitely knew what it was and I was hoping it wasn’t going to continue to get worse and on every restart it just got so bad. The pace was just so fast, the speeds were so high that it just was vibrating so hard that, you know, you could barely stand it through your body down the straightaways getting into the corners, you know? I couldn’t feel anything through the corner through my butt with the car just feeling tight, feeling loose and all that. Just visually and through the steering wheel, so you’ve got to have everything kind of right in order to be fast here – especially at Dover – and I thought we were going to be alright, but just not today.”
