CUP: Is Kyle Busch Toast?

Sprint Cup

CUP: Is Kyle Busch Toast?

Kyle Busch is in sixth position in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings...

Mike Hembree | Posted October 14, 2010 Charlotte, NC

Kyle Busch speaks to the media after blowing a motor during the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Pepsi Max 400. (Photo: Getty Images)

In a moment of serious dejection, Kyle Busch declared his shot at the 2010 Sprint Cup championship over and done after an engine problem slapped him with a 35th-place finish last week at Auto Club Speedway.

Busch wasn’t moving much from that quick-time analysis Thursday at Charlotte Motor Speedway, but he stressed that there’s no quit in him.

“Our goal is to try to win the rest of the races and try to spoil it,” he said. “Realistically, you’re not going to beat seven or eight guys and make up 187 points the rest of the year unless they all have trouble at least once or twice. That’s why I said our Chase hopes and dreams are lost.”

That’s a tough admission for Busch, an uber-competitor who starts every season assuming he’ll be in the hunt for the championship.

“We see the championship hopes diminish, but we don’t see the reason not to race,” he said. “We’ll see what we can get. If we can get back up to fourth or third or even second in points, that’s great. But I don’t foresee all those guys having problems.”

Busch’s Chase history has not been sensational. He finished 10th in 2006, fifth in 2007 and 10th in 2008.

“Every year I’ve been in the Chase, something’s happened,” Busch said. “It’s very, very, very frustrating, and it’s very disappointing, too. You build your year in the first 26 races to make the Chase. You make the Chase and now you have a chance for the championship, and – boom – before you even get halfway in the Chase, you’re already realistically knocked out. Not mathematically, but realistically, knocked out.

“This is another one of those years. I’ll have to bounce back as best as I can. I’m not giving up, but all we can do is what we can do on the race track. If I go out there and win the last six races, and Jimmie Johnson finishes in the top 10 even in all those races, I won’t beat him. There’s not enough points there that I’m going to make up on him. It’s going to be hard to do, and it is very frustrating to that point, but that’s racing sometimes, I guess.”

Busch said he doesn’t doubt that his team can compete for a future championship, but he said Johnson and the 48 team currently are racing in a league of their own.

“It’s whether or not Dave [Rogers, crew chief] can put the right stuff under the car to make it happen,” he said. “We’ve been getting a lot better. This is mine and Dave’s first year of working together. That’s not an excuse, but we’ve gotten a lot better from where we were. We’ve done really, really well, I feel like.

“We’ve been a lot more consistent this year. We’ve had some troubles, we’ve had some bad runs or some mediocre runs, but those are race tracks we typically have those anyway. We’ve had some really good runs at tracks that I do suck at. It’s been a learning year for us both with working together and getting used to each other and getting better going to the race tracks for a second time.”

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.

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Mike Hembree

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