Kyle Busch second 3-time winner
Cup driver joins Kevin Harvick with third victory
RICHMOND, Va. — The debate over the best driver in the 2018 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season is unlikely to be settled next Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway. That’s because the Alabama track is not only the series’ largest and fastest, it’s also the most unpredictable, putting even the most talented drivers one corner away from calamity.
Still, all eyes will be on Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick as NASCAR’s two most dominant drivers battle for earlyseason supremacy.
With Busch’s victory Saturday night at Richmond Raceway, he matched Harvick with three wins in 2018, each coming in a streak of three races. Harvick won the season’s second through fourth races, and Busch has prevailed at the three most recent events. Austin Dillon, in the season-opening Daytona 500, reigning series champion Martin Truex Jr. and Clint Bowyer have the other victories through the first nine races.
Busch might be on a dazzling roll, but he knows that is relatively meaningless when matched up to the madness of Talladega, where speed and competence can only take you so far when the field is bunched up in packs with restrictor plates on the cars.
“Pretty cool to win three in a row,” Busch said after celebrating at Richmond. “But next week we go to Talladega. I think it’s easier to win the Powerball than win at Talladega. We’ll give it a go anyway, see what we get.”
There’s no denying that Busch and Harvick will be among the favorites even if Harvick hasn’t won at Talladega since the spring of 2010 and Busch since the spring of 2008. They have simply been that good through the first two months of the season, not only leading the series in wins but ranking either first or second in laps led, top-five and top-10 finishes and playoff points.
Busch led only 32 laps at Richmond and didn’t take his first lead until the final stage. The fact that he drove to victory at all, given that he started 32nd, shows how strong his No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing team has been this season. Busch set a track record for lowest starting spot to prevail at Richmond, breaking the record that Bowyer set in the spring of 2008 when he started 31st.
Harvick paced the field for only eight laps, but he, too, had to overcome adversity when his No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing team was penalized on the first pit stop, dropping Harvick to the tail end of the longest line on the restart to open Stage 2.
Yet when the checkered flag flew, both Busch and Harvick, who finished fifth, were up front.
“We were terrible on the restarts there compared to three or four of those guys,” Harvick said. “But all of the night taken into consideration, we were way better here than we have been in the past. …
“Tonight, we contended, and that is a much better building block than we had coming into the weekend.”
But as Dillon proved at Daytona International Speedway — the track most similar to Talladega in terms of speed and unpredictability — a dominating drive can be irrelevant in a pack race. After all, Ryan Blaney led 118 of 200 laps in February and finished seventh. Dillon led one lap — the final one — and etched his name in history.
In the most recent race at Talladega, last October, Brad Keselowski led only seven laps and passed Ryan Newman on the final lap to take the checkered flag. That race saw just 12 drivers finish on the lead lap and more than half the field suffered crash damage. When Ricky Stenhouse Jr. won at Talladega last May, he led only 14 laps and, like Keselowski, used a last-lap pass to seal the deal as he overtook Busch in overtime.
Stenhouse and Keselowski as well as Joey Logano, Keselowski’s teammate at Team Penske, should each be factors next weekend. The Ford drivers have combined to win the past six races at Talladega. But don’t be surprised if Busch and Harvick are positioned near the front as the laps dwindle. Neither ran well in the Daytona 500, so that will provide additional motivation in their battle for season supremacy.
“For me, I’d rather the No. 4 win every race so less people win and the more opportunity for somebody like us to get in (to the playoffs) on points if we need to,” Stenhouse said. “It doesn’t really bother me that a couple people are winning most of the races, but those two are definitely by far the fastest cars out there right now.”