Joe Gibbs Racing driver Kyle Busch was made available to media at Martinsville Speedway:
KYLE BUSCH, No. 18 M&M’s Halloween Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
Does this race have any sort of a wild card element as far as what you can control and what you can’t?
“Yeah it does. With just respect to late in the race coming down to late restarts, whether it’s inside 20 (laps) to go, sometimes, maybe, definitely inside 10 to go, no question inside 5 to-go restarts. Nobody has any care for anybody else at that time and you just run over anybody you can run over.”
You have a 14th-place average finish in the Playoffs so far, has it been nice to have those Playoff points to fall back to or has this team just been tested too much, in a way, for your liking?
“Obviously it’s a good thing we ran the way we did through the regular season and got some bonus points, the bonus points that we had to help us through. As far as results of the Playoffs, I mean I don’t have a sheet in front of me, but I can run you down problems in every single race. There hasn’t been a clean race that we’ve had in the Playoffs that have given us the opportunity to run up front all day and be in control of our own destiny towards the end of the race. We’re always coming from behind. Every time you come from behind, you can only make up so much and last week we showed that again. We drove through the field three times and could only get to second. We were limited by second there at the end, even with four tires versus the guy out front with two.”
What’s the significance of your helmet?
“The significance of the helmet here is we’ve been doing a giveaway on the BundleofJoyFund.org – people can go there and donate $18 to then have their chance to be entered into an opportunity to win this cool helmet here. Thanks to M&M’s and Toyota and everybody for allowing me to – giving me the helmet space for a couple of weeks during Halloween. This is just kind of a cool thing that we get to do to raise some money for the Bundle of Joy Fund. Tickets are 18 bucks. We’re looking forward to picking out the grand prize winner that gets to take home this cool helmet. Then we’ve also got some little cool giveaways too for second and third.”
Where is the concern level in this round and getting to Homestead if you’ve had trouble with running clean races?
“Whatever comes up next, tackle it when it gets there. What are you going to do? I can’t tell you that I’m going to have a perfect race and everything is going to be clean and I could go out there and win Martinsville. If we could, let’s go home. You just have to tackle it as it comes against you and deal with it then.”
Can you point to one thing that’s hindered you and your team from getting more wins after Pocono?
“Circumstances I guess. We had an opportunity to win Loudon and we had damage on a restart with five (laps) to go in a stage and then had to come back down (pit road), which ruined our track position for the day on that one. Same exact thing happened last week. We pitted, had damage at the end to finish a stage, had to come down and come from behind and then we had a throttle problem. I can go on. Give me the list of the season and I can tell you what’s happened to us. It’s just been frustrating for sure. Unfortunate circumstances – I put myself in the fence in Vegas to start with, came back from that and then we had something else happen. Time and time again, over and over. Again, just haven’t had any clean races. It’d be nice to have a clean race. We were running up front all day at Talladega, we missed a couple wrecks and then all of a sudden, we were the cause of the last big one. Tell me what I’m supposed to do to fix what’s going on.”
Looking ahead at Texas, did you learn anything from Kansas Speedway that will transfer over to Texas, especially when it comes to restarts.
“Restarts in (Turns) 1 and 2 are certainly treacherous, just the way the banking is not quite there to hold you like it used to be. The track ends are very different in 3 and 4, different than 1 and 2. You kind of see, especially with the Xfinity cars with the lower downforce, they have a bit more issues. We’ve seen some late-race restarts and some problems for some guys in that race a couple of times and for us, it’s no different. We also have some of the same issues. We learned some things last week I think at Kansas that helped our car and hopefully we can transfer some of that knowledge to Texas and Homestead as well.”
Do you have some confidence though knowing that you won Phoenix in the spring?
“I’d like to think that this round is a good round for us anyways. We run well at Martinsville. We run well at Texas. Coulda, shoulda won the Texas race, got in the wall late and then had a flat tire. Phoenix, yeah, we won Phoenix this spring, but that was nine months ago. So much has changed since then, it’s entirely different now so maybe we can still be good when we go back there hopefully, but a lot’s going on in the development of everybody’s cars and things like that for this season.”
Do you know where the improvements are in the cars across the board for people in regards to Phoenix?
“I don’t know for everybody. We’re all picking and choosing and wining and dining everything on the cars, whether it’s front downforce, rear downforce, lower drag, setups, different combinations of shocks and springs and what kind of wheel rates and things like that, that we’re all working with and dealing with and how the cars evolved. There’s a lot. It’s not just one little thing.
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