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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Kyle Busch Finally A Pocono Contender
Kyle Busch was second in the last Pocono race...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted July 28, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Kyle Busch (Right) and crew chief Dave Rogers (Left) confer. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Kyle Busch has never been a big fan of Pocono Raceway, the tricky and flat 2.5-mile triangle that is quite unlike any other track where the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races.

And it’s understandable why: Starting from the second race of last year and working backward, Busch’s previous eight finishes at Pocono were 22nd, 16th, 43rd, 36th, eighth, 12th, 22nd and 12th. Not exactly the stuff of legends, especially for one of the biggest winners in the sport.

But in June, Busch finally may have figured out the fast way to get his No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota around the track. In the June Pocono race, the younger of the two Busch brothers qualified on the pole and finished second to teammate Denny Hamlin, far and away his best career weekend here.

Not surprisingly, Busch has a whole new attitude about racing in the beautiful mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania. In fact, Busch hasn’t had a single top-five Cup finish since his last Pocono race, so instead of dreading coming here, he’s actually looking forward to it.

He said he’s “really proud” of his runner-up finish, which he credited in large part to crew chief Dave Rogers.

“Dave and my guys gave me a great race car,” Busch said. “Our M&M’s Camry was good. We kept messing with it all day, trying to make it a little bit better. I think it’s just the driver here who can make up so much with lap time. Denny has this place figured out. I did the best I could. I went from about an 'F' at knowing how to get around here to about an 'A,' and an 'A' didn’t get it done. But I was very satisfied with how we ran there, knowing how tough it’s been for me there in the past.”

Busch planes to attack the track in mostly the same manner this time around.
Kyle Busch recorded his best career Pocono finish in June. (Photo: Getty Images)

“The biggest thing you change for Pocono, it’s just a little bit hotter,” he said. “It gets a little bit slick. Your lap times will be a little bit slower, so you just have to drive it a little bit differently. Besides all that, really there’s not much change there. I hope we can take that same approach we did in June with our M&M’s Camry this weekend. You run the race track as similarly as you can. You still work on the same things. All the same things seem to be a little bit more escalated because the grip level isn’t as high.”

Like all his fellow drivers, Busch finds the three distinctly different Pocono turns to be problematic.

“The hardest part of the track, for me, is probably Turn 1, and then Turn 2 is the second-hardest, and then Turn 3 is the third-hardest,” he said. “Turn 3, last year, because of the patch they laid down, we couldn’t go down low and get underneath somebody and get a run on them because, when you come off the corner, you’re 8 to 10 mph slower than the guy on your outside, and they’re just going to blow right by you going down the straightaway.”

Turn 1 is also the riskiest place on the track, because it’s the fastest.

“Most of your passing is going to be done probably through Turn 1 and off of Turn 1 and getting into Turn 2, if somebody can get a good run off of Turn 2, get back up high and get in line to get on that patch getting into Turn 3. Besides that, in Turn 1, we just can’t get the cars to turn down there because there’s so much load on the bump stops from going 210 mph down the front straightaway and then trying to slow it down to about a (140). Turn 2 is kind of bumpy and kind of rough. There are different areas where you’ve got to maneuver through the Tunnel Turn to get your car right. If you miss it just by a little bit, you tend to knock the wall down off the corner, so it’s tight.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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