Atlanta; All Kyle Busch, All The Time!
By: Drew Hierwarter
I’m about to write something I never thought I would write, ever! I’ve become a Kyle Busch fan. There I said it and I’m glad. When Busch first arrived on the Sprint Cup circuit I thought he was overly cocky for someone who hadn’t paid any dues. He got himself in trouble several times for some of the things he said in the media and earned himself many trips into NASCAR’s “Oval Office”, the dreaded trailer. I didn’t like him. But then something happened that I wasn’t sure I understood. Other race drivers started saying good things about him. People like former Series champion Dale Jarrett called him “talented” and his then teammate Jeff Gordon called him one of the best race car drivers on the circuit. Last season when Busch was looking for another ride after being replaced at Hendrick Motorsports by Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Coach Joe Gibbs asked his drivers Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin if he should hire Kyle. Both enthusiastically agreed. What was going on here?
As the 2008 season gets underway, Kyle Busch is showing all of us why those in the know thought so highly of him. He is now the only driver who has led laps in all four of the Sprint Cup races so far. He is leading the points in two of NASCAR’s three top series. And were it not for a blown tire in Saturday’s Nationwide race in Atlanta, he’d be leading the points there too! Kyle Busch basically put on a driving clinic in Atlanta this past weekend. He won the Craftsman Truck race on Friday night in spectacular fashion. If there was traffic on the bottom, he passed on the top. If there was no room up top, he’d run on the bottom. Ron Hornaday said he never saw somebody who could drive a truck that out of control and still be fast.
In Saturday’s Nationwide Series race only the aforementioned blown tire kept Busch out of Victory Lane. Eventual winner Matt Kenseth said; “We were all running for second place until Kyle had his problem there.” Then on Sunday, in the Kobalt Tools 500 Sprint Cup race, it was more of the same as Kyle Busch once again ran away from everybody. Tail out and sliding, working the steering wheel for all he was worth, running high, and running low, Kyle Busch was something to watch. The kid can drive a race car! He led a one-two finish for Joe Gibbs racing as Tony Stewart followed Busch under the checkers. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. who led early after starting from the front row, had another good run finishing third. Greg Biffle and pole sitter Jeff Gordon rounded out the top five.
The only thing that kept the race from being exciting was the near total lack of control any of the cars had on the rock hard tires that Goodyear brought. It was all most could do to just hang on and keep their race car off the fence, never mind trying to actually race with anybody. After the race Kenny Wallace told the Speed TV audience that “There was no race today”. Drivers throughout the garage area were worn out after the event from fighting ill handling race cars for 500 miles. Jeff Gordon said he felt more like he had driven 1000 miles than 500. And he said that there was never a time, not one lap in the entire race that he felt like he was under control. But Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. were the most critical placing the blame directly on Goodyear for bringing a tire that was much too hard for the cars to get any grip at all. Earnhardt said that the tires they used in testing wore out too fast but these tires didn’t wear at all. He thought that Goodyear should’ve found some middle ground. Tony Stewart went so far as to call them “crap” and “. . .the worst tires . . . of my professional career”. He then promised that he was going to immediately dismount all the Goodyears from his personal vehicles at home and replace them with Firestones!
If nothing else, the Atlanta race proved to everybody, race teams and tire engineers alike, that this new car for the Sprint Cup series really is a different animal. You can draw a lot of parallels to 1981 when NASCAR downsized their race cars from 115 inch wheelbase to the 110 inch cars we have been so familiar with. Crews couldn’t figure how to set those cars up at first either and drivers complained about how poorly they handled. But before long they stopped trying to use what worked on the old cars and got the new cars figured out, and the same thing will happen here. The NASCAR circuit has some of the smartest people in racing and they will soon get a pretty good handle on this new car and when that happens, everyone will forget about races like the one this past Sunday. But now you’ll have to excuse me because I want to run out and get a Kyle Busch T-shirt before they’re all gone!