KYLE BUSCH
On to Richmond
HUNTERSVILLE, North Carolina (Sept. 17, 2019) – It was the first race of the 10-race Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, and 2015 champion Kyle Busch and his M&M’S Hazelnut team began their quest for their second championship Sunday with a disappointing result at his hometown Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
But in the playoffs, drivers and teams take the bad days, minimize them as much as possible and move on, which is exactly what Busch and crew chief Adam Stevens plan to do. The good news for Busch, driver of the No. 18 M&M’S Hazelnut Spread Toyota Camry, is the next race on the schedule is at Richmond (Va.) Raceway, a place where he has the best average finish of any track on the current schedule.
A quick look at Busch’s Cup Series statistics at Richmond shows six career victories – most among active drivers – including two in the last three races there. In addition to his six career wins at the .75-mile short track, the Busch’s Richmond stat sheet shows 17 top-five finishes and 21 top-10s in 28 career starts, making him the most consistent active drivers at the track.
The Las Vegas native is at the top among active drivers in average finishing position at Richmond – 7.0. Next best is Kevin Harvick’s average finish of 7.9. Busch has completed all but one of the 11,229 laps available to him in his 28 Richmond starts. Of those, Busch has run in the top-15 for 9,947 laps, or 88.6 percent, which ranks second among active drivers.
His 19th-place finish in Sunday’s playoff opener at Las Vegas placed the Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) pilot fourth in the playoff standings with a healthy 36-point buffer over 13th-place Ryan Newman. The 16-driver playoff field gets whittled down to 12 drivers after the third playoff race Sept. 29 on the Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway “roval” course. Only those drivers with a win or a top-12 spot in points get to continue their championship pursuit.
Back to Busch’s Richmond record – four of his six career wins came in consecutive spring races from 2009 to 2012, besting Richard Petty’s previous record of three Richmond spring-race wins in a row from 1971 to 1973. With his impressive statistics and records to back him up, it’s little wonder that a visit to Richmond is one of Busch’s favorite stops on the NASCAR tour.
So, as the series heads back to the “Capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia” for the Richmond track’s new spot as the second playoff race, Busch and the M&M’S Hazelnut Spread team look to bring home their seventh career win there. Whether or not they make it back to victory lane, history has shown they’ll have the driver and team everyone will be on the lookout for with the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs in full swing.
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KYLE BUSCH, Driver of the No. 18 M&M'S Hazelnut Spread Toyota Camry for Joe Gibbs Racing:
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What does it take to get around Richmond?
“Richmond is getting a little trickier, it seems like, just with the asphalt kind of getting older and the way the cars are. The consensus at Richmond is, of course, just trying to get your car to turn, but also having really good forward bite. You have to be able to get off the corners at Richmond. You have to have good brakes, as well, and be able to turn the center. All of it correlates. Everything you want as a racecar driver, you’ve got to have most all of it and, if you don’t, then you better hope you have more forward bite than the rest of them. That’s sort of the equation of Richmond. It’s a fun place to race. It’s really cool. As a driver, you wish it could widen out and give you more options of being able to run around in different grooves, but it hasn’t shown us that the last couple of years. We’re hoping to get our M&M’S Hazelnut Camry another win there and put last week behind us.”
Is a win at a premium right now?
“I think wins are always important and I think the biggest thing now is that each (playoff) round kind of has its own wild-card race, if you look at it – you’ve got the “roval” in the first round, Talladega in the second round and then Martinsville kind of turned into a crazy race in the third round. It’s all just going to be about trying to maintain and have a good day. If you can get top-five finishes, great, that’s going to propel us through with the amount of points we have and the point cushion we have, but wins are the ultimate. If you can get those, then you’re automatically in and that’s what we all strive for.”
How do you view the use of your bonus points in the playoffs?
“It’s kind of an insurance policy. We all pay for insurance to hopefully never have to use it, but it’s there just in case. For us, we’ve done a great job of being able to build those points up throughout the regular season and it’s nice to be able to have that point structure in place to kind of give you the opportunity to have your early season success help you through the postseason. I think it’s the most fair structure that we’ve had through the playoff era.”
Does having the points as insurance change how you approach any of the rounds?
“No, not at all. First and foremost, we try to figure out how we can win each and every week. Then as the races go on, we then kind of figure out what the points look like and where the cutoff is for guys who are or aren’t going to make it.”
Can you compare Bristol and Richmond, both places where you’ve been successful?
“There’s really no comparison between racetracks, honestly, because Charlotte, Texas, Atlanta – they all look the same from overhead, but they all drive not even close to the same. Richmond and Bristol are more than oil and water, more than day and night. Bristol is an attack-type racetrack yet, when you attack, you can get yourself in trouble. Richmond is a very methodical racetrack and you have to be – you’re very much on edge there all the time, especially corner entry, getting into the corners. You’re always loose there and you have to be able to be loose there in order to carry the speed through the middle and have good drive off.”
Do you enjoy the atmosphere at Richmond?
“I think the coolest thing about Richmond is the atmosphere they have there with all the fans really getting into it. People love coming there and supporting that racetrack. It’s been around for a long time. It’s a fast racetrack. It’s only a three-quarter-mile oval but it has really high speeds that makes it fun for us drivers and makes excitement that’s fun for a fan. Martinsville is a short track and it’s slow, but Richmond is pretty quick.”
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