Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Busch hopes to outrun rivals
Only this time, it’s for second Cup series title
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Three contenders for the NASCAR Cup championship have already given Kyle Busch a good run for the money three days before the race.
Busch and teammates Martin Truex Jr. and Denny Hamlin were stuck in New York City traffic on Thursday with fellow Championship 4 member Kevin Harvick and it was proposed that Busch couldn’t run to the hotel faster than they could get there by car. There was $1,000 on the line and a videographer on hand to follow the Las Vegas native’s jog through Manhattan snow flurries.
Hamlin, the ringleader of the impromptu contest, joked that sending Busch out for the run was part of a bigger plan.
“Just trying to hamper my competition, get him some shin splits, maybe a sore throat,” Hamlin said.
Busch won the bet, and he is ready to cash in again in the winnertake-all shootout Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
This is how things are most of the time in today’s NASCAR, where side bets and hijinks and camaraderie are far more common than cutthroat competition. It helps explain why this final foursome is so relaxed, Gibbs’ trio of Toyota drivers Busch, Hamlin and Truex as well as Harvick in a Ford from Stewart-Haas Racing.
All but Hamlin are former series champions and he’s the newcomer in a group that otherwise includes drivers racing for the title for a third consecutive season.
Hamlin, whose last championship chance came in 2014, won last weekend at Phoenix to save his season and earn a spot in the final — the Ford EcoBoost 400, which falls one day before his 39th birthday. Hamlin tends to use the two-race stretch of Phoenix and Miami to unwind; last week, despite facing elimination, he rented a house with a pool and tennis court and had a “boy’s weekend”
with fellow title challenger Kyle Larson and others that included a Post Malone concert.
This week, Hamlin showed a tinge of old-school confidence when he corrected questions that began
“if you win the championship” to “when” he wins the championship.
“We’re going to have fun. It’s my birthday weekend. I want to have two reasons to celebrate, not just one,” Hamlin said. “We have a chance to compete. It is goal accomplished. Now we just got to go out there and do it.”
Busch, meanwhile, is attempting to turn things in a different direction. The regular-season champion, Busch, 34, has not won in 22 weeks but still made his fifth straight championship field. He won won the Cup title in 2015.
“To be part of it the last four is cool but to come out ‘one of the last four’ is not so cool,” Busch said. “Is this Kyle’s time being here five years in a row? I’d certainly like to think so.”