Toyota Racing – Kyle Busch
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
Atlanta Motor Speedway – February 23, 2018
Joe Gibbs Racing driver Kyle Busch was the fastest Toyota driver in final MENCS practice and made available to the media in Atlanta:
KYLE BUSCH, No. 18 Snickers Creamy Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
What happened in practice?
“Just got loose. We were trying to run a run and the car was pretty good with fire off there. We ran some really good times and then just kept getting a little bit looser, a little bit looser. I tried to go back to the bottom and run the bottom to see how slow I had to be to go around the bottom and just snapped.”
We’ve seen people get loose here before at Atlanta. Was it normal loose for you or were there contributing factors like the weather or new package?
“It was just tire wear. Just normal getting looser as you kind of go. It got a little bit loose for a couple of laps and then just really really loose there that lap that I crashed. I went through (turns) 3 and 4 in the middle just fine – no looseness at all and then tried to run the bottom in 1 and 2 and just spun out.”
How will your prospects be having to start at the back of the field on Sunday now?
“I think it’ll be fine. Obviously, I think the biggest unknown is just the backup car, but I trust in Adam (Stevens, crew chief) and my guys and everybody at Joe Gibbs Racing that we’ll be fine and it’ll just have to be a managed race – a differently managed race than what we expected from yesterday’s qualifying.”
How do you deal with the frustration of having to go to a backup car?
“It’s not at all what any of us wanted obviously – 12 laps into practice and having that issue happen. Certainly the corner speeds are higher so the – when you do have an issue, the issue happened really fast. It happened faster than it typically would because the corner speeds are higher, so the crash was harder to save. In past, I feel like I would’ve been able to do a better job.”
Did you get any sense of what the race will be like running those 12 laps?
“Not really. It looked as though lap times there towards the end of practice – guys putting on tires and stuff, they were all kind of trimmed to the same level because there were guys that were running a lot of the same lap times to fire off, but then it was just the rate of falloff that everybody had that was a bit different. I expect it to be the same old Atlanta-type race.”
Do you have to change setups now since you’re starting at the rear?
“I don’t think so. I think we just have to finetune the balance. We just got to fix the balance and not have it go so loose with laps.”
How important is it that you missed some practice time this weekend?
“I’ll have more practice than all the rest of these guys as soon as I run 130-something laps in a truck race, so I’ll be just fine.”
