CUP: Has The Shrub Grown Enough To Be Champion?

Sprint Cup

CUP: Has The Shrub Grown Enough To Be Champion?

Kyle Busch is back in the Chase this season a year after missing out...

Mike Hembree | Posted September 15, 2010 New York, NY

Kyle Busch has finished no better than fifth in NASCAR Sprint Cup points. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Kyle Busch exploded onto the NASCAR scene with such fury that many observers assumed he would rocket to a Sprint Cup championship – or crash himself silly trying to get there – within five years.

That goal wasn’t reached, but Busch has his best chance in this his sixth full season at the top level of stock car racing. The question now is: Has Shrub grown enough to win it?

Busch still has his volatile moments, but the rumble meter seems to have been muffled to a degree, and there is the anticipation that a cooler Kyle has a better shot at the title. He has finished no higher than fifth, a position he hit in 2007, his final year with Hendrick Motorsports.

He will start the Chase Sunday at Loudon as the fourth seed, thanks to three victories this season.

“Personally and everything, yeah, I’m ready to win it,” Busch said Wednesday. “I’ve been trying to win this deal for a long time. This year with Dave [crew chief Dave Rogers] and our communication, it’s gone well. The way we’ve really grown and learned together and been able to work together this year – it’s been great for us.

“You look at guys like myself or Clint Bowyer or Greg Biffle, who hasn’t won a Cup championship. We’ve won championships, but we haven’t been able to capitalize on a Cup championship yet. That’s what we need to do. That’s where the sport is. I’m looking forward to being able to change that and have one in my column at the end of the year.”

Busch said he has built a base of patience that will allow him to accept a top-five finish when he can’t win, a key to the consistency that makes Chase champions. Those who have seen the level of his disappointment when he loses despite having a good car know how tough he can be on himself and the people around him, however.

Denny Hamlin, Busch’s teammate (and the guy who’ll start the Chase as the top seed), said Busch will benefit from dropping the full-time Nationwide schedule he ran last year – and from additional growth time.

But does he have the composure to score and win over a 10-race, pressure-packed run?

“I’ve seen the meltdowns first-hand,” Hamlin said with a grin. “It’s tough to say. It’s so funny. When we talk about Kyle away from Kyle, we say if we can just get past those summer months when he’s going back and forth and you see the meltdowns when he’s trying and ends up getting in the wall and ends up losing 20 spots.

“He hasn’t done that as much this year. I think he’s figured things out. It’s like me. He’s lost enough to know what it takes to win. And I think he’s better now because of that.”

Busch won the Nationwide Series championship last season but did so under the cloud of missing the Chase on the Cup side. That failure remains a sword in his side.

Kyle Busch is the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series' most recent winner. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

“The biggest week of disappointment was this week last year and not making the Chase and ultimately coming up with the decision that we needed to make a change,” Busch said. “We made a change in crew chiefs with Dave Rogers coming on board from Steve Addington. I thought Steve was a great car guy and knew a lot about the cars and could make cars go fast, but sometimes we struggled and wouldn’t fix those struggles through practice and the race. This year it’s been a lot different. We’ve been able to fix things and get better.”

Busch said he remembers the pre-Chase period last year as a dismal time.

“I didn’t have a whole lot going on,” he said, smiling. “There wasn’t anything to do. It was pretty disheartening. I was thinking I could be in New York right now doing all the Chase media stuff. I actually liked doing it a lot more than I like sitting at home and not doing anything.

“You fight every day of your year to make the Chase, and this is part of that.”

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike Hembree

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