From Hero to Zero; Busch’s Championship Hopes Go Up In Smoke
By: Drew Hierwarter
For most of the 2008 NASCAR Sprint Cup season Kyle Busch has been at the top of the points. He entered the “Chase for the Championship” with a commanding lead and was the odds on favorite to win it all. Now, just two races later, not only is his lead gone, but he has dropped all the way to the twelfth and final position, and in his own words he says; “We’re done”.
Indeed, his 210 point deficit does seem insurmountable. To make up that many points in the eight races remaining would take an almost complete collapse of the leading teams, something that while possible, seems highly unlikely. But anything can happen.
Jeff Burton said it best when he told the media, “This stuff is hard. But it’s the top motor sport in the country; it’s supposed to be hard. It’s hard just to run tenth in this series. What happened to the 18 team could happen to any of us at any time. They’re a good team that’s had a run of bad luck.”
That bad luck consisted of a broken part that led to a crash at Louden, and a blown engine that relegated them to a last place finish at Dover. But crew chief Steve Addington remained positive; “It was human error on the first one, at Loudon,” Addington said. “This right here, Mark Cronquist [JGR head engine builder] and his guys have been bulletproof all year long. If anybody says anything about our engine department tell them to come and see me.”
But after spending fifteen minutes in the hauler to compose himself before speaking with the media, Kyle Busch remained frustrated. “At this point, it doesn’t matter [if I think I have a chance to win the championship],” Busch said, “Same thing happened two years ago — exact same thing: Wrecked at Loudon, blew up here. So where did we end up [in 2006] — dead last.”
So now the strategy changes. The team no longer needs to worry about protecting a lead or watching who might be coming from behind. There’s nobody behind them and they can only go up from here.
Addington put the cap on it when he said; “We’re going to go out and try to win races. We can take some chances, do some different things now and have some fun and finish this year up. If we go out and win races and guys start having bad luck we can be right back in this thing. We’re not out of it. We’re not saying we’re dead. We’re going to keep on kicking.”