Move to Joe Gibbs Racing gives Kyle Busch superpowers

By TONY FABRIZIO
Media General News Service
Published: July 7, 2008

DAYTONA BEACH — Kyle Busch was good at Hendrick Motorsports. But never this good.
Why now, with Joe Gibbs Racing, is he suddenly unstoppable?
He has great equipment for sure. But his teammates, with the same equipment, haven’t exactly been tearing up the Sprint Cup Series. Denny Hamlin and Tony Stewart have one win between them.
Busch has won six of the first 18 Sprint Cup races — two more races than he won in three full seasons with Hendrick — and he leads the standings by 182 points. Across all three of NASCAR’s national divisions, he has won 12 times in 2008.
Matt Kenseth believes Busch has found the elusive perfect fit at Gibbs.
“A lot of times you’ll get together with somebody with good chemistry and figure it out better than you can with somebody else,” Kenseth said after Busch won Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400 at Daytona. “Obviously, he’s hit it off with his team and he has good stuff.
“He’s just been pretty much on fire.”
Busch has been good, lucky and resilient. Consider his two victories on restrictor-plate tracks: At Talladega, he lost a lap after making an unscheduled pit stop. A few breaks went his way, and he calmly fought his way back to win. Saturday night at Daytona, he fell to 37th after being hit by Hamlin halfway through the race. Even when his steering went away, he didn’t panic.
“It wasn’t really the steering that went,” Busch explained. “[Crew chief] Steve [Addington] mentioned that I must have peeled the tires pretty bad. They were so hot that when I got going the next couple of laps, it just felt like the steering wheel had a lot of play in it. I think the tires were so hot they weren’t reacting.”
By the time the race was down to its final frenetic laps, Busch had put himself in position to win. He had gotten to the inside of Jeff Gordon and nudged ahead just before a big wreck forced a green-white-checkered overtime finish.
On the restart, Busch craftily kept the field bunched up behind him. The traffic backup resulted in two wrecks, the second of which involved several cars and forced a caution that froze the running order.
Busch was slightly ahead of Carl Edwards at that point. Composure, as much as anything, had won the race for him.
“You try to stay up front and keep everybody else behind you, but even running up front, you can have a guy that gets into your rear bumper and gets you sideways,” Busch said. “A lot of crazy stuff goes on, and these cars [NASCAR’s new cars] don’t drive as well as the cars before did.”
As good as Busch has been, he still has room to improve over the second half of the season. His team hasn’t been very good on the so-called flat tracks. Extra testing to correct the problem is planned. It’s scary how good Busch and the No. 18 team could be by the end of the year.
Drivers get 10 bonus points for each victory going into the Chase, and Busch has an advantage of 40 points over the field.
“He’s really setting himself up for a great start of the Chase,” Edwards said of Busch. “If he wins one or two more, he’s almost got a freebie there if he blows an engine or has a bad race or something. They are doing it right, and it’s going to be hard for the rest of us.”
Busch’s teammates didn’t fare so well Saturday night. Hamlin wound up 26th after leading twice but crashing. Stewart had to give way to substitute driver J.J. Yeley on Lap 72 of the scheduled 160 because he was battling flu symptoms. Yeley earned 20th-place points for him.