TOYOTA NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (NSCS)
Kyle Busch — Notes & Quotes
Daytona Media Day – February 14, 2013
KYLE BUSCH, No. 18 M&M’s Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
How long do you think about a race weekend after it’s over?
“Some of them never get away from you — you can second guess yourself all the way into next year. It’s just the things that you try to learn from those events to do better the next time. On an average there’s probably a couple days — Tuesday or Wednesday that you try to start forgetting about the previous week unless it was a good week. Then moving on and concentrating on what you need to do for the upcoming week.”
What is the biggest race you have won and what would it mean to win the Daytona 500?
“The biggest race that I’ve won has probably been my hometown race in Las Vegas — that was a big one just because of it being a hometown. Then the Bristol night race — that’s a big race on the schedule. Probably one of the top five or six. Darlington — I won the Southern 500 and that was a big win. The Daytona 500 of course is the biggest of them all and I
want to win that race. Any race car driver that’s a NASCAR-type guy wants to win that race. For me, I’ve been close a couple times and had the opportunity to. I’ve led the most laps before we even got to halfway and been crashed 10 laps later. Just freak things tend to happen in the Daytona 500 sometimes that you never really hope to happen.”
What do you think of the 2013 cars versus the COT?
“I think (Brian) France finally admitted that there were some mistakes made in the design process of bringing that car to the race track. It makes me feel a little bit better. I was vocal about it just because it was not a race car. It was not a NASCAR that we needed to go to the race track with and race with. Whether that was interpreted wrong from the beginning or throughout time, it’s now evolved into this Gen-6 race car which I think looks amazing. I think NASCAR took the right approach with the engineers from the different race teams as well as the manufacturers to work not only on the design, but the complexity of everything that goes into designing these cars instead of just taking it on their own and doing what they did with the COT. There’s a lot more hype built around this car this year. It still has the same chassis configuration, the same safety regulations with the door foam and roll bars that have actually been added this year that the old COT still had.”
What do you think about the addition of Matt Kenseth to Joe Gibbs Racing?
“He’s (Matt Kenseth) a great competitor and obviously a champion, although I do remind him that he won a championship in ’03 and not in the current Chase era. He’s got the notoriety of a multi-Daytona 500 winner and he’s a really cool dude. He’s very down to earth, he’s very well-respected with Denny (Hamlin) and myself. I’ve never had a spat with Matt on the race track never being his teammate before. It’s pretty cool to now have the chance to work with him and really get to know how Kenseth goes about things and what he can bring to the table at JGR (Joe Gibbs Racing).”
What can you learn from Matt Kenseth?
“It seems like Matt (Kenseth) always has a good race car. I can always be either really good or kind of bad where he’s always good and they can make it better and make it into a winning car throughout the race. That’s something you can definitely learn from Matt and kind of picking his brain and understanding what he’s looking for through practice and what are the different things that he tries to focus on at these different race tracks that we go to that make him good versus what I try to do.”
How do you deal with the different types of fans?
“You’ve got the fair-weather fans or bandwagon fans and there are a lot of those out there for sure, but there are those that are diehard fans whether your season is as bad as 2012 was for Kyle Busch or not. A lot of those people are on Twitter and you know their names or you know their pictures or whatever and then you meet them in person and you know who they are and can put a face to the name. It’s pretty cool to see that you have such a following like that and such a respect from those fans. That’s what makes you do what you do and love what you do — you have those that care about you.”
