Sports News
Brickyard Edge Goes to Kyle Busch
Kyle Busch has been a dominant force this season and he’s the driver to beat in Sunday’s Allstate 400 at the Brickyard at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
If the young, aggressive Joe Gibbs Racing driver winds up kissing the bricks after winning one of the marquee events on the Sprint Cup schedule he will have picked up his series-leading eighth win in what has become one of the most dominant seasons in recent memory.
He and his team have hit on what it takes to contend for wins race after race.
Since 1980 only the late Dale Earnhardt in 1987 had more victories (eight) than Busch at this point in the season. There are just seven races left before the start of the Chase for the Championship -- NASCAR’s 10-event season-ending playoff to decide supremacy in its top series and Busch is leaving little doubt this could be the year he wins his first Sprint Cup championship.
History favors the 23-year-old’s chances at finishing on top. Eleven of the previous 16 drivers who won at least seven of the first 19 races captured the Cup title. What’s more six of the past 14 drivers who won at Indianapolis Motor Speedway also drove away with the Cup championship.
Two week’s ago at Chicagoland Speedway,Busch’s move to pass two-time defending Cup champion Jimmie Johnson on the final restart with just two laps left not only helped Busch complete a sweep of the weekend’s Windy City races (he also won the Nationwide Series event in the first night race at the track), it also provided another example of Busch’s aggressive driving style that should serve him well at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The Sprint Cup Series had a rare open date last week which means that Busch’s crew chief, Steve Addington, has had an extra week to prepare the No. 18 Toyota for the Brickyard. That likely can only be bad news for the rest of the field.
Busch has made only three career Cup starts at Indy but finished fourth last season and has shown steady improvement in the three races – all top-10 finishes.
One of Busch’s teammates at Joe Gibbs Racing, Tony Stewart, recently announced he will leave the organization at season’s end but expect him and his team to race hard right to the finish line in the last race of the year at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
The two-time Cup champion is still looking for his first victory of the year but he has won two of the last three Brickyard Cup races. The Indiana native dominated the field in winning this event last year, leading seven times for a total of 65 laps.
In nine career Cup starts at this 2.5-mile quad oval Stewart has finished outside the top 12 just once — in 2001.
Stewart, who is tenth in the points, will make his 340th career Cup series start on Sunday and will be in the same chassis that made its debut at Pocono in June and led for 14 laps before a late speeding penalty on pit road led to a disappointing finish.
Closest to Busch in the standings is Dale Earnhardt Jr. but he trails the points leader by a whopping 262 markers. Junior finished fourth last month at Pocono, which is similar to the layout at Indy. Eight of Junior’s 18 career victories have come on tracks that are two miles or longer so that could bode well for him on Sunday. He has yet to win a Cup race at the Brickyard and has a pair of top-10 finishes in eight starts. The best of those came two seasons ago when Junior came home sixth.
Carl Edwards is fourth in the points and is a driver who is no stranger to finishing in the top 10 this season. In fact, he shares the lead with Busch for most finishes in that category. And he appeared ready to run his streak to nine top 10s in ten starts if not for a broken splitter, which caused him to finish 32nd at Chicagoland Speedway. Like Busch, Edwards is an aggressive driver and the best of his four previous Brickyard starts was a run to ninth place two seasons ago.
Like Stewart Jeff Gordon is looking for his first victory this season. Gordon should be happy to be returning to Indy, where he is on a short list with three other drivers (A.J. Foyt, Al Unser and Rick Mears) who have won four Brickyard races. The No. 24 Chevy of Hendrick Motorsports has finished in the top 10 at Indy in four of its last five starts and those results included a win in 2004.
Jimmie Johnson, one of Gordon’s teammates at Hendrick Motorsports, has not raced quite as well at Indy. Yes, the two-time defending Cup champion won the 2006 Brickyard race but that was only his second top-10 effort in his last six starts at this venue. In the other four Brickyard starts, Johnson’s best effort was a run to 18th place five seasons ago. But Johnson’s talents as a driver are simply too hard to ignore. What’s more, the El Cajon, Calif. native is riding a hot streak of five top-10 finishes over a span of seven starts that has pushed him up to fifth in the standings.
It is also worth keeping an eye on Jeff Burton, Kasey Kahne and Kevin Harvick. Burton was very consistent during the first half of the season as he finished 15th or better in 17 consecutive starts. But the veteran driver, who is third in the standings, crashed late at Daytona International Speedway three weeks ago and finished outside the top 15 at Chicagoland Speedway a couple of weeks back.
Burton will be in the same Richard Childress Racing car that he drove to a sixth-place finish at Charlotte in May and a fifth-place result last month at Pocono Raceway.
In four previous Brickyard starts, Kahne has a pair of top-five finishes and was the runner-up in just his second start at the track in 2005.
Harvick battled with Stewart at the Brickyard during several parts of last year’s race before fading to a seventh-place finish. But he did win this event in 2003 and only Busch and Stewart have a higher average finish among drivers with at least two Cup starts at Indy. Harvick has three top-fives and five top 10s in seven starts at the track.
My darkhorse pick is the surprising Brian Vickers, who has posted four top-fives this year (including a runner-up finish at Pocono in June) and is just 95 points out of 12th place in the standings — the final spot for qualifying for the Chase.
The track surface is abrasive and track position means a whole lot at this venue. Every move a driver or a team makes — whether on the track or in the pits — is done with track position in mind.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a tough track to drive because there is only one real groove that being down low. On some tracks if a driver's car doesn't handle well in the fastest groove, he can search around until he finds a different line to run but that's not often the case at Indianapolis.
This track is also unique in that it is shaped like a rectangle with two long straightaways connected by a pair of short chutes at both ends. With four very tight corners, there won't be much side-by-side racing in the turns, which further reduces the chances to pass while emphasizing the importance of track position.
The driver who can get low going into the corner and who can keep his car’s momentum coming out of the corners will be the fastest car down the straightaways.
Pit stops will see some drivers changing two tires instead of four because a crew can put on two tires in eight or nine seconds while the fastest change of four tires is around 13 seconds — and gaining four seconds at Indy can seem like gaining an eternity.
But don't look for any two-tire stops until later in the race when a good deal of rubber has been put down on the track, making it less abrasive and opening the door for some strategic decisions regarding how many tires to change on a pit stop.
Also pit road at Indianapolis is narrow and I wouldn't be surprised to see a top car have its chances of winning the race eliminated because of it getting caught up in an accident on pit road.
NASCAR
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