Kyle Busch celebrates with a burnout after winning at Dover in May 2010. (Photo: Getty Images)
Dover International Speedway has been one of the capitals of Kyle Busch’s racing success in recent years.
As he has reached the century mark in total wins (now 104) in NASCAR’s three major series, Busch has turned Dover into a sort of “home” track. He has scored two Sprint Cup wins, three Nationwide wins and three Camping World Truck wins at the one-mile track, and all of those victories – other than a Truck win in 2005 – came in the past three years.
The Dover stop comes at a good time for Busch, who hasn’t exactly pummeled the rest of the Chase field in the first two weeks of the playoffs. Zapped by fuel mileage at Chicagoland, he finished 22nd. He failed to lead a lap Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway while battling a poor-handling car, although he turned a bad day into an acceptable result by finishing 11th.
Those runs put Busch in sixth place in the Chase standings entering Sunday’s third race. He’s 26 points behind leader Tony Stewart.
Busch will roll into Dover with all guns firing.
“I think we’re going to play it out as we have all year,” Busch said. “We haven’t changed anything. We’re just going out there to do the best we can to run the hardest we can, the smartest we can, and let the results take care of themselves.
“If we finish enough times in the top five or the top 10, or win a couple, then the results will take care of themselves. For us, we’re not pressured. We’re 26 points back … and there are a lot of guys with the same amount of points around us. We just have to keep in mind that there are still eight more weeks, there are still a lot more miles left of racing, and we’ll see where it falls.”
As for Dover, Busch got a handle on the tough track early.
“I love that place,” he said. “It’s fun to race there, and it’s a place that I’m looking forward to going to with our Interstate Batteries Camry. I went there when I was 18 to race in the Nationwide Series for my first time. It will scare you the first time you race there.
“You carry so much speed at this race track, and, for it to be a mile in length and for it to be concrete – concrete surfaces that we race on, anyway, are a little bit slick. It’s definitely a roller-coaster ride, and you need to treat it like it’s fun and not to be scared of the place, I think, because you can get so much out of that place.
“There are two ways about it – you can probably be really, really good there, or really, really bad there. Some days you’re going to be better than others, obviously, with how you can get your car set up compared to the competition. For me, just getting to race there in the trucks and the Nationwide cars and the Sprint Cup cars – to me, it gives me a little more experience on the race track. It helps me understand a little bit more about how the rubber gets laid down during the race and how the different cars might handle.”
Dover’s concrete surface and its long, sweeping turns make for a fast afternoon.
“You’ve got to be fast through the corner,” Busch said. “Two-thirds of your lap time is through the turn rather than down the straightaway, so you definitely have to make sure you have a good-handling race car – one that’s good in the beginning of the run on low air pressures and one that’s good at the end of the run on high air pressures, and even through traffic, too. Some of the most challenging times are when you’re trying to get through traffic with guys.”
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
