HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. (Sept. 13, 2011) – Last weekend’s 26th NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race of the season at Richmond (Va.) International Raceway marked the end of the “regular season” for Kyle Busch and 11 other drivers locked into the 2011 Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship.
So, as the Sprint Cup Series heads to the start of the final 10-week, 12-driver “playoff” starting Sunday with the Geico 400 at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Ill., what kind of changes will the driver of the No. 18 Doublemint® Toyota Camry for Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) make in an effort to win his first Sprint Cup title? The answer is absolutely nothing.
Busch and the Doublemint team plan on doing what they’ve been doing all season long, having notched four wins, 13 top-fives and a series-high 16 top-10 finishes, along with a series-best 1,801 laps led. Their philosophy will be to not overhaul the approach that got them into the Chase during the first 26 races of the season in order to come out on top over the final 10 races.
The top-seeded Busch locked up a spot in the Chase for the fifth time in his seven-year career. His best Chase finish of fifth came in 2007. Busch and second-seeded Kevin Harvick both have four wins on the season and will start the Chase even at 2,012 points, but Busch is officially the top seed by virtue of his two second-place finishes to Harvick’s none.
NASCAR recalibrated the points for the 12 drivers as soon as the Richmond race was over, resetting each of the 12 Chase drivers at 2,000 points. With the exception of the wild-card entrants Keselowski and Hamlin, the top-10 drivers also received three bonus points for each win during the 26-race regular season. For drivers starting the Chase with identical point totals after the three-point bonuses were doled out, their seed was determined by the traditional tiebreaker of best finishes beyond race victories.
This weekend, Busch is looking to rekindle the magic he showed at Chicagoland in 2008, when he captured wins in both the Nationwide and NASCAR Sprint Cup events at the track just southwest of Chicago.
Those victories in the first-ever night races at Chicagoland gave the talented 26-year-old his first two wins at the 1.5-mile oval that opened its doors in 2001, a feat that he’ll look to repeat on Sunday as he will sit out Saturday night’s Nationwide Series race to focus on his Sprint Cup entry.
While the Friday-night Nationwide Series win in 2008 was a dominant one in which he led twice for a race-high 101 laps, the conclusion of the following night’s Sprint Cup race left everyone talking for quite some time.
When a late-race caution set up a green-white-checkered finish, Busch lined up behind now five-time Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson. On the final restart, the Las Vegas native made a bold and surprising move to the outside in turns one and two, passing Johnson and holding him off to bring home his seventh win of the season at the time.
So, as Busch heads back to Chicagoland this weekend for the start of the 10-race Chase, he’ll not only hope to reproduce some of that Chicagoland magic of 2008, more importantly, he hopes to keep doing what he’s been doing all year long. If he does so over the course of the next 10 races, Busch just might be bringing home his first Sprint Cup championship.