NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: Kyle Busch – Championship Timber?
Kyle Busch made NASCAR history at Bristol Motor Speedway last week...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted August 23, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Kyle Busch, driver of the #18 Doublemint Toyota, drinks champagne in Victory Lane after winning the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series IRWIN Tools Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway. (Photo: Getty Images)
Join NASCAR driver Kyle Busch Tonight on NASCAR Race Hub at 7 pm ET. Busch had a record-setting weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway capturing victories in the Camping World Truck, Nationwide and Sprint Cup Series.

Brad Keselowski and all those Bristol boobirds aside, a strong argument could be made for placing the Sprint Cup championship trophy at Kyle Busch's feet after his magic weekend.

Busch won all three NASCAR races at Bristol last week, a first-time achievement and one that isn’t likely to be repeated soon – unless Busch does it again.

At the tender age of 25, Busch has 19 Sprint Cup victories. There seems to be little doubt that he eventually will be a Sprint Cup champion.

The question of the moment: Can he do it this year?

The answer: Why not?

Although he hasn’t had a spectacular season – not even a very good one by his standards, Busch should have a better shot at the title than many of the other challengers to defending champion Jimmie Johnson when the Chase begins in three weeks.

Busch jumped to third in points with his Saturday night win at Bristol and, with at least 30 bonus points to his credit in the Chase standings, he’ll be near the top when the 10-race run begins at Loudon, N.H.

Since he had eight straight top-10 finishes in the spring, his season has drooped somewhat. A string of double-digit finishes dropped him from second in points to eighth, but his Bristol run provided evidence that the team has caught up with the driver and that Busch can be a force to be dealt with in the championship hunt.

“You can say, yeah, it’s a confidence booster,” Busch said of the Bristol win. “We still know how to win; we know how to do this.

“You know, I feel like going on into Atlanta [next week], it’s going to be a test for us to see how good we are again at the mile and a half stuff, and then we go to Richmond, another one of our racetracks that I tend to run well at and Dave [Rogers, crew chief] gave me an awesome car last time. So I’m looking forward to that, and then the Chase starts. We hit reset and we've got 10 weeks to show what we’ve got, and hopefully it’s enough.

“I’m not going to say that just in one night we’ve turned it around. You know, I feel like we’ve got to show ourselves next week like I mentioned at Atlanta, a place I’m not very strong at, and at Richmond, another place I tend to run well at. For the last nine weeks the way we’ve run, we could have finished better, we should have finished better. I made mistakes, maybe Dave would admit to making just a couple mistakes.

“But I feel like we do it as a team. We win and lose as a team. That’s what we’ve talked about, and we’re here to do going forward, what we did this weekend, keep communicating on what we can do to try to make the cars better. I’ve had winning cars at places before so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to return that. But sometimes guys just hit it and figure it out a little bit better than you, and you’ve got to comprehend that sometimes, too.”
Kyle Busch won all three major NASCAR events at Bristol Motor Speedway in August. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Busch is famously impatient with cars that are not to his liking, and he often doesn’t respond well to finishing anywhere other than first. Dealing with the ups and downs of the Chase could prove problematic.

“If I came out of here every week happy for losing, I’m not here for the right reasons,” Busch said. “That’s when I need to go away. I’m here to try to win, and if I don’t win, I might not entirely be happy unless we struggled through a day and then all of a sudden, boom, we ran second or third, and then its like, yeah, we got a good day out of here, that was good, a good points day or whatever. That’s kind of just the way I am. That’s kind of what you guys have seen for the years that I’ve been here and probably the years to come.”

How soon those years produce a championship remains to be seen. This year? Might not be smart to bet against it.

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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