Las Vegas Driver Ratings: Busch Brothers Should Battle Martin for Vegas Win

by Micah Roberts
Las Vegas Review-Journal

The frenzied pace the crews of each driver were exhibiting during Saturday’s final practices were a matter of knowing that practice could be wiped away by rain at any moment. Most of the drivers ran several laps with race trim on Friday before qualifying just with anticipation that Saturday’s all important practice would be rained out.


The second official NASCAR Cup series practice could be construed as the most important practice because of most teams feeling there wouldn’t be much practice and attempted to put out there best stuff with no gimmicks or, “let’s try this” type of attitudes.

Both Saturday practices went through without any rain or obstruction, but the urgency teams placed on the second practice holds a lot of weight when attempting to determine who looks to be the best candidate to win on Sunday.

In the first Saturday practice, Las Vegan Kyle Busch not only had the fastest single lap of the day, but he also had the best average times of the session. Not far behind was his brother with the third best times, Kurt Busch, who is pole sitting Sunday, and had the most laps run of all early practice session drivers with 37.

The big story coming into the week was the resurgence of all the Childress drivers and how their success last week at California could easily translate into success this week. Both are down force tracks that require lots of horsepower and that is exactly what the Childress cars exhibited more than any other team last week.

However, practice has been a different story for at least two-thirds of the team. Clint Bowyer is using a chassis he ran twice last season with mediocre results, but he looked the best and showed that he should be capable of getting a top-5 finish and possibly a win with his great practice sessions Saturday.

Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton are a completely different story. The two Childress drivers who battled for the win last week were less than stellar in practice times, and that may be putting it mildly. Each brought new chassis’ this week and both teams never got the hang of things throughout each session.

Both have the engines to compete and do well Sunday, but they’re going to need a lot of in-race adjustments to get their cars going at the same pace this weeks top contenders.

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