Busch brothers’ mad dash to finish
THE NASCAR playoffs begin this week, not in a bubble, but on an odd and treacherous oval in rural South Carolina carved from what once was a peanut and cotton farm.
One corner of the Darlington Raceway is tighter and banked more steeply than the other, all because the guy who built it promised a farmer he wouldn’t disturb his minnow pond.
Which sort of bring us to the Busch brothers of
Las Vegas. Most give Kyle and Kurt only a minnow’s chance against the stock car racing whales after the two qualified No. 14 (Kyle) and 15 (Kurt) among the 16 drivers who remain eligible for the championship.
The Busch boys are to the NASCAR playoffs what Kentucky and North Carolina are to March Madness. Kurt’s 14 postseason drives tie him for first among this year’s field with title favorites Kevin Harvick and Denny Hamlin; Kyle’s 13 rank second. The siblings have combined for three championships with Kurt winning in 2004 and Kyle in 2015 and last year.
But experience in NASCAR apparently doesn’t count as much as having a fast hot rod.
Title hopes melting
This year has been a chocolate-covered mess for Kyle Busch that has nothing to do with his primary sponsor (M&M’S).
It might have a little to do with the virus pandemic and the elimination of practice sessions during which Busch is renown for adding tenths of seconds onto his speed. But for whatever reason, he and the No. 18 team have failed to click on a winning combination for the first time in 17 seasons.
The younger Busch, 35, has won 56 Cup Series races but none this season in 26 starts though many in the garage area still consider him the fastest thing on four wheels.
“We’re going to start every single one of these playoff scenarios behind the 8-ball,” said Busch, who won five times en route to copping the Cup in 2019. “Certainly we’re not a title frontrunner, we’re not a favorite.
This year, it’s been … what’s going to happen next, and what’s the next thing that’s going to test your patience?”
He said now it’s a matter of trying to make chicken salad out of chicken feathers, much as Tony Stewart did nearly a decade ago.
Like Busch this year, Stewart went winless during the 2011 regular season before catching fire to win five of the 10 playoff races and edge Carl Edwards for the championship on a tiebreaker.
In the NASCAR playoffs, points for winning regu
lar-season races and race stages carry over. But race winners during each elimination round automatically advance to the next one. It’s a bit like drawing the Take a Ride on the Reading (Railroad) card from the Chance deck in Monopoly. You pass Go, you collect $200, you go on to race another day.
There’s a bit of whimsy to the NASCAR playoffs that provides those on the outside a way back in.
“All you have to do is win a race in each of these rounds and you put yourself right into the championship four,” Busch said of the driver quartet that will decide the championship in a straightup battle at Phoenix Nov. 8. “Now, all of the sudden, a crappy 2020 season is a championship year, or can be.”
Kurt words
His big brother is in the same spot but isn’t nearly as miffed with his regular-season performance, perhaps because expectations weren’t as high for him as they were for Kyle.
Kurt Busch, 42, strung together some nice finishes before the virus pause but hasn’t been quite as consistent in Chip Ganassi’s No. 1 Chevrolet since racing resumed in front of empty grandstands.
“We’re in that underdog-type position also,
(but) with the tracks that are coming up — Darlington and Richmond and Bristol — those are all my favorites,” he said about leap-frogging drivers and qualifying for the second of three elimination rounds that begins Sept. 27 at his hometown track in Las Vegas.
Kurt’s average finish of
6.8 at Darlington over his past five races ranks second among the championship-eligible drivers; Kyle’s 8.0 is fourth.
“If we have one good stage, we can jump up to eighth in points before the halfway break at Darlington,” Kurt said about how quickly one can get back into contention during the playoffs.
That might be looking at it through rose-colored goggles. But where there is a chance and there is a Busch, there is sometimes a way.