Kyle Busch: Knowns and Unknowns at Bristol

As the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series heads back to Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway for Saturday’s Irwin Tools Night race, Kyle Busch is facing some knowns and plenty of unknowns in the racing mecca known as “Thunder Valley.”

The obvious known is that the driver of the No. 18 Doublemint® Toyota Camry for Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) has a stellar record at the .533-mile high-banked bullring, with five Sprint Cup wins to his credit in 15 career starts there.

While his Bristol dominance has been well documented in recent years, there are plenty of unknowns that lie ahead on Saturday night. For starters, since the March 18 Food City 500, the Bristol track has undergone another round of changes. For starters, the top groove of the racing surface has been changed to eliminate the progressive banking incorporated during the previous track resurfacing project in 2007. How drastic will the changes be? That’s a huge unknown until practice commences at noon Friday.

The next unknown for the Las Vegas native is his position in the Sprint Cup standings as the 12-driver, 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup locks in after the next three events. Busch sits 14th in the standings but is just 11 points behind Ryan Newman, who holds the second of two Chase wild card positions. Busch and Newman both have one win and another win by Busch in the next three races could essentially lock him into NASCAR’s postseason. If not, Busch will hope to have strong finishes and leapfrog Newman for the final Chase spot by virtue of a higher position in the points. Meanwhile, Busch must also keep his and Newman’s fellow single-win drivers this season –Jeff Gordon, Joey Logano, and Marcos Ambrose – behind him in the standings.

Despite the surface changes at Bristol, Busch hopes many of the same principles apply that led him to his five Sprint Cup wins there, including four in the last seven races.

While Busch is on quite a roll at the “World’s Fastest Half-Mile,” it’s interesting to note he didn’t immediately take to the place and has been able to adapt to past changes there. During his rookie year in 2005, he posted finishes of 28th and 33rd. But Busch’s record in his last 11 Bristol starts has been nothing short of amazing. After bringing home finishes of eighth and second in 2006, Busch captured his first Sprint Cup win there in March 2007. The track was resurfaced after that race and, since then, nobody has been better at the concrete short track than Busch. He added four more wins, five top-five finishes and seven top-10s in the last 10 Sprint Cup races contested there.

Those numbers are certainly impressive, and Busch’s most notable Bristol feat occurred in August 2010, when he became the first driver in history to win all three of NASCAR’s national touring series events in the same weekend. He won the Wednesday-night Camping World Truck Series race, then the Friday-night Nationwide race, and he topped it off by wheeling his No. 18 Doublemint Toyota to victory and into the history books in Saturday night’s Sprint Cup race. Busch led four times for a race-high 282 laps in the latter event, bringing his weekend total to 514 laps led of a possible 956.

So while there are both knowns and unknowns on tap for Busch this weekend, it’s a safe bet that Busch and the No. 18 Doublemint team will be right in the thick of things on Saturday night.

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