Kyle Busch goes for second win on Sonoma's road course

Kyle Busch finished 17th at Sonoma last year, but won in 2008.

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. (June 18, 2013) – In most team sports, having home-field advantage can make a difference in the outcome of a game, and that typically occurs for at least half of each season in most sports. In NASCAR, however, while most competitors race at venues near their hometowns at one time or another, a driver will have usually no more than two “home games” each 36-race season.

Not so for Kyle Busch, driver of the No. M&M’s Toyota Camry for Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) at Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Toyota/Save Mart 350k at Sonoma (Calif.) Raceway. The Las Vegas native feels very much at home all up and down the western part of the country, where the series races no less than five times each year from Phoenix to Sonoma.

While he’ll be enjoying a home game of sorts this weekend, Busch is also hitting the road – namely the 1.99-mile road course at Sonoma, for Sunday’s 350-kilometer challenge of both right turns and lefts.

Before 2008, nobody even thought to mention Busch as a threat to win either of Sprint Cup’s annual road-course events at Sonoma and Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International. But that all changed shortly after his arrival at JGR at the start of 2008 as Busch dominated the road-course scene that year, leading 130 of a total of 202 road-course laps and capturing victories at both Sonoma and Watkins Glen.

Similar to NASCAR regulars like Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon who are known to be strong on the road courses, Busch quickly established himself five seasons ago as a routine road-course contender and has been in the hunt on road courses ever since. Most recently, Busch qualified second in August at Watkins Glen, and then led a race-high 43 laps before losing the lead on the last lap after hitting an oil slick and subsequent contact with Brad Keselowski.

Busch hopes to continue the run of consistent and strong finishes he’s gathered over the last three weeks, during which two top-five and three consecutive top-10 finishes have vaulted him to sixth in the series standings after sitting 11th prior to the event Dover (Del.) International Speedway’s “Monster Mile” three weeks ago.

So, as the Sprint Cup Series heads to its annual stop in Northern California’s Wine Country, everyone knows Busch is capable of winning anywhere in his comfortable surroundings of his “home” out West, just like he did at his hometown Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2009. They also know he’s always a threat to win on the “road” courses, as he is this weekend at Sonoma.

KYLE BUSCH QUOTES:

How intense have the road-course races become?
“I think, ever since double-file restarts came about, aggression at Sonoma has gone up a lot. You have these cautions that come late in the going and cautions breed cautions – especially on a road course and especially with double-file restarts. It just seems to be out of control there. You’re trying to take everything you can get and all the positions you can because it’s coming down to crunch time. It’s a place where, for me, it’s been fun to race. I’ve won there and I’ve also had some disappointing runs there and I’ve had some mistakes there – some wheel-hop issues and things. For me, it’s a place where you’re turning right and turning left and being at a road course is kind of like an off weekend, so you try to enjoy it the best you can and hope we can stay on course and get a good finish with our M&M’s Camry.”

How challenging is it to race against road-course specialists who you might not race against on a regular basis?
“It’s different, for sure. There are a lot of guys out there who have the road-racing background, who know a heck of a lot more about road racing and technique than we do. The neat thing about road racing is just being able to have – it’s like a vacation weekend. You just go out there and have fun and do the best you can and you’ll either do really well or you’ll do really badly and you just go on to the next one. We do have some testing for it and you try to pick up on it but, with respect to who you’re racing, you can expect to race a little bit of a different crowd. (Marcos) Ambrose has been really good, of course, so we’ve been racing him more and more on the ovals, too. Juan Pablo (Montoya), the same thing. Jimmie (Johnson), Jeff (Gordon), who have been a lot better at the road courses, so now you race against them, you race against Tony Stewart. A lot of the guys who race well at both, you race against every week.”

Do you enjoy road-course racing?
“The road courses are fun. For me, I enjoy it. It’s pretty cool to go out there and race the road courses. You get to turn right, turn left and everything, so it’s fun. Sonoma is more technical just because there are more turns and it’s a little bit slower. You have to concentrate on getting off the corner a little bit and have good forward bite. Sonoma, in our M&M’s Toyota, is going to be fun, going out there and seeing what these cars have this year. It will be a fun race, though. I always look forward to going up there and challenging the road course.”

Is it important in your career to have a road-course win?
“I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s great to be able to have wins at all types of facilities. I think, in ’08 when I won the road-course races, I also won the road-course (NASCAR Nationwide Series) race in Mexico. That was a big road-course year for me, for some reason. I just clicked at all of them. We’ve run top-five and top-10 since, but haven’t quite been the car to beat at those road courses. I enjoy that type of racing and I’d like to get back to it, and it’s cool, the opportunity that comes at Sonoma.”

What’s your favorite part of racing at Sonoma?
“The elevation changes can make it a lot of fun but, in the beginning, I was lost at Sonoma, to be honest with you. I raced Legends cars and other road courses five years ago and learned the technique and stuff of shifting and braking and all that, and then got to the Cup cars and they’re so different. I was just lost. I give a lot of that credit to testing with Jimmie (Johnson) and Jeff (Gordon) a lot of times and learning a lot from those guys when I was at Hendrick and working with them. And, of course, more of that expertise goes to Max Papis, who was our test driver at Hendrick, and learning stuff from him and reading reports that he did and picking up on it, following guys like Boris Said and Robby Gordon, the guys who are good at it and are fast at it.”

Do you have a favorite winery to visit while in Sonoma?
“I really don’t have a favorite winery. I just enjoy going out there and getting to hang out with some friends and Samantha (wife). We just tour around a little bit before the race weekend starts. It’s some cool countryside to see and it’s relaxing to take a bit of a break from our hectic schedule.”

- True Speed Communication for Mars USA/Joe Gibbs Racing