Kyle Busch rallied from a myriad of issues and saved just enough fuel to score a solid 10th-place finish in Sunday’s Brickyard 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The result was Busch’s 12th top-10 finish of the season and his fifth top-10 in seven career Sprint Cup starts at Indianapolis.
“Definitely had no idea that the day would be so ugly, but yet we came out of it smelling like a rose with our M&M’s Camry,” Busch said. “All in all, the guys did a great job. We worked our butts off this whole weekend trying to get something out of nothing.
“We just could never get the car to be fast at the beginning of a run. That kind of hurt us in qualifying a little bit and got us back there in traffic. Got up front and on one of those pit stops there, I didn’t know the ‘14’ (Tony Stewart) was coming around me. We ended up running into him on pit road and tore up the car and were stuck back in traffic the rest of the day. Then had some pit strategy there at the end to try to make it on fuel and we did. Commend Dave (Rogers, crew chief) and the guys for giving me good fuel mileage and the JGR (Joe Gibbs Racing) engine shop – they did a nice job today. We’ll take 10th and go on to Pocono.”
While the aforementioned qualifying effort relegated Busch deep within the 43-car field for the start of the 160-lap race, the driver of the No. 18 M&M’s Toyota Camry began to methodically move up from the drop of the green flag. The talented 26-year-old worked his way up to 15th by lap 30, and eighth by lap 65 as a two-tire pit stop helped Busch gain precious track position.
With each stop crew chief Dave Rogers continued to make small adjustments to the M&M’s Camry. While the handling was decent overall, Busch just needed a little more help with getting the back of the car to turn.
But after finally gaining the track position he needed, things began to go incredibly wrong for Busch during a lap-95 pit stop. As Busch was leaving his pit stall after taking just two tires, Stewart was attempting to enter his stall, which was just ahead of Busch’s. The result was the right-front of Busch’s machine colliding with the left side of Stewart’s car. Busch quickly backed up his Toyota and the M&M’s team worked feverously to fix the damage, making repairs fast enough to stay on the lead lap.
But despite the quick work by the No. 18 team, Busch had lost the track position he had worked so hard to attain, and was forced to restart in the 27th position on lap 98. Yet again, the Las Vegas native went to work and managed to reach 20th by lap 107, but shortly thereafter bad luck struck again. As Busch was exiting turn two on lap 112 whole being passed by Carl Edwards, the air off Edwards’ car forced Busch up into the SAFER Barrier exiting the turn. The hit was enough to bring out the caution, whereupon Busch brought his M&M’s Camry to pit road in
order to fix the right-side damage.
While Busch had a wounded M&M’s Camry, he and the No. 18 team never gave up. Even though they had little chance of salvaging a good finish, Rogers began work on a fuel strategy that might help dig them out of the hole their two incidents put them in. During what turned out to be the final caution period of the 160-lap race, Rogers brought Busch down pit road one lap prior to when the race was set to go back green and took fuel on lap 125. With that, Rogers calculated that Busch needed to save approximately three laps of fuel throughout the final 34 laps
in order to finish the race without pitting again.
To his credit, Busch did a masterful job of backing off just enough in order to make it to the finish on fuel, while many in the field were forced to pit road for a quick splash of gas in order to make it to the end.
“We had to save two to three laps of fuel on the final run,” Busch said. “What really surprised me was that those guys that were running up front were running hard and making it. Like the ‘27’ (Paul Menard) made it and the ‘78’ (Regan Smith) made it. Those guys, I expected them to run out. They must have had just enough. We barely made it back into the pits according to what the paper says. We did the best with what we had. We knocked the nose in and it was an ugly way to salvage a 10th-place finish, but we’ll take it.”
At the other end of the spectrum were Busch’s JGR teammates, who lost out on the fuel mileage game. Joey Logano wound up 25th and Denny Hamlin finished 27th.
Menard won the 18th annual Brickyard 400 to notch his first career Sprint Cup victory, and in doing so, became the fourth first-time winner of 2011, joining Trevor Bayne, Regan Smith and David Ragan.
Jeff Gordon finished .725 of a second behind Menard in the runner-up spot, while Smith, Jamie McMurray and Matt Kenseth rounded out the top-five. Stewart, Greg Biffle, Mark Martin, Brad Keselowski and Busch comprised the remainder of the top-10.
There were five caution periods for 22 laps, with nine drivers failing to finish.
With round 20 of 36 complete, Busch continues to lead the JGR trio in the championship point standings. His 10th-place finish bumped him up one spot to fourth, where he has 666 points and is 16 markers behind series leader Carl Edwards. Hamlin lost one position and now sits 11th with 587 points, 95 markers back of the top spot. Logano also dropped one spot in the standings and now sits 19th with 529 points, 153 points behind Edwards.
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