Kyle Busch Talladega Preview: Volatile Track Could Get Erase Chase Deficit Quickly

KYLE BUSCH ON WHAT HE LIKES TO DO WITH 5 LAPS REMAINING AT TALLADEGA: “You just want to be leading and protect what you’ve got and try to keep the rest of the guys behind you. You know it’s going to be tough. You know it’s going to be crazy and guys are going to try to go three-wide, four-wide and everywhere trying to get a push-draft going and everything. If you were leading and you had a teammate behind you or something like that, obviously that would make it pretty good.”

BUSCH ON WHO HIS FAVORITE DRAFT PARTNER IS AT TALLADEGA: “I don’t know. I’ve drafted well with a lot of people over the past, but I would say (Juan Pablo) Montoya helped me win the race that I won at Talladega a couple of years ago. Jimmie (Johnson) is always pretty good to draft with. My brother (Kurt Busch), as well, but many more than that. It just all depends on which other cars end up working well with your car.”

BUSCH ON THE KEY TO WINNING AT TALLADEGA: “The key there is to somehow stay out of trouble with our M&M’s Camry. You pretty much stay around the bottom, since there is a lot of grip
there, and you can pretty much run wide open every single lap. Everyone can run up on top of each other. When you get single-file at the bottom, sometimes it’s hard to get a lane on the outside with enough good cars to get something going. It can be frustrating at times because of that. It also seems to still put on a good race each time we go there. If you can be a contender and stay in line on the bottom, you can make it a pretty easy and safe race. Normally, guys are not content doing that, so that’s when it starts to get crazy.”

BUSCH ON ANY ADVANTAGE HE MAY HAVE BY WINNING AT TALLADEGA IN THE PAST: “It doesn’t matter at all. It’s such a crapshoot there in the last 20, 30 or 40 laps that you never really know who is going to win, what’s going to happen, and where the wreck is going to come from.”

BUSCH ON SPORTING THE HALLOWEEN THEMED CAR AND SOME OF HIS COSTUMES GROWING UP: “Actually, one year I went as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I think that was my favorite costume as a kid. I was Michelangelo and I even had the fake nunchuk. One year, I was a football player and, one year, I even dressed up as Jeff Gordon since he was my favorite racecar driver when I was kid.”

BUSCH ON MEMORIES OF TRICK OR TREATING WHILE GROWING UP IN LAS VEGAS:“It was always cold in Las Vegas during Halloween, even though it can be really hot most of the year. I guess the biggest memory was going out to everyone’s house and trick-or-treating and hanging out with friends as a group. Sometimes, people wouldn’t be home, so they had a bucket out and you would reach in and grab whatever you wanted out of the bucket. It was all about how much candy you could collect, not necessarily about how much you would eat when you got home.”

BUSCH CHASSIS CHOICE: Chassis No. 260 - This chassis will make its third-ever start in Sunday’s AMP Energy Juice 500. No. 260 made its debut in February’s Daytona 500 at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway, where Busch started seventh and finished 14th. The M&M’s team brought this chassis to Talladega in April for the Aaron’s 499, where Busch started sixth, stayed out of trouble, and finished a respectable ninth.

- True Speed Communications Press Release