Sharpie Professional 250 - Kyle Busch Notes

KYLE BUSCH
NO. 5 LOWE’S CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO
BRISTOL PREVIEW

Team 5 Driver Kyle Busch tackles Bristol Motor Speedway this weekend hoping to repeat the qualifying success the Lowe’s team enjoyed at Darlington when it won its first pole of the season. After leading 40 of the first 49 laps, mechanical trouble midway through the race relegated Busch to a 17th-place finish and kept him 12th in the driver point’s race. DRIVER KYLE BUSCH:

ON BRISTOL SPEEDWAY:
“It’s pretty cool. I’ve been wanting to get out on this banking ever since I saw a race from here on TV. It was a little intimidating when I first got out there during testing a couple of weeks ago, but it’s not quite as bad as my first trip to Winchester (Speedway, in Indiana). The first time I drove a Late Model there was pretty scary. The two places are similar. I think Winchester has 33 or 34 degrees of banking, and it’s a half-mile track, but it’s asphalt instead of concrete. You have to run right up next to the wall at Winchester, kind of like you do at Darlington, so it’s intense.

ON WHAT HE FOUND OUT IN TESTING:
“You have to go light into the corners. You’d think you’d need to charge in a lot harder, but if you go in light, you can come off the turn pretty hard. You’ve got to also make sure that your car is tight enough that when you come off the turns, you don’t break loose and ‘tail slap’ the car against the fence.”

ADVICE FROM HIS BROTHER ON HOW TO SUCCEED AT BRISTOL:
“I’ve talked to him a lot. I just wanted him to give me a bird’s eye view of what to expect, since he’s done so well here. I tried to talk him into giving me some of his setup info, but he claims he doesn’t remember what he used here last year. I’ll have to go bug him again when we’re testing in Texas this week.”

CREW CHIEF LANCE McGREW

ON WHAT THE TEAM WORKED ON DURING ITS TEST SESSION AT BRISTOL:
“Kyle had never been here before, so we just tried to run a bunch of laps and get him comfortable with the line around the racetrack. We didn’t do a lot of setup stuff, just a few things here and there to make him more comfortable.”

ON THE SETUP THE TEAM WILL START OFF WITH FRIDAY MORNING:
“It will probably be a combination of the setup we used last year with Brian (Vickers), and some ideas we’ve gotten from the No. 25 team. Brian tested here in a Cup car and he hit on a few things. We’ll just unload with kind of the same setup we wound up with at the end of testing the other day, and have the other setup in my notebook if I don’t feel like we’re where we need to be. I may just throw the other setup in to see what Kyle thinks about it. We’ll try a couple of different things before qualifying and final practice.”

ON THE TEAM NO. 5 PIT CREW (the crew helped Busch pick up six positions during the last pit stop at Darlington):
“Those guys have pretty much picked up where they left off last year. We haven’t had any personnel changes, and they’re really getting the job done on pit road.”

STATS & FUN FACTS

CHASSIS INFORMATION- Hendrick Motorsports Chassis No. 229

Lance McGrew – “This is the same car we were running so well with last year in Texas when we got penalized for supposedly jumping a restart. This chassis is one of our more constant cars. We carried it around a lot last year as a backup car.”

FIRST TIME – Kyle Busch is the first Raybestos® Rookie in the NASCAR Busch Series to win a pole at Darlington since the series began competing there in 1982.

EARLY END – Kyle Busch and his No. 5 Team Lowe’s Racing crew were originally scheduled for two days of testing at Bristol Motor Speedway on Wednesday and Thursday, March 10-11. The test session came to an abrupt end early on Wednesday afternoon when Busch’s primary car made hard contact with the turn 1 retaining wall. With the car too damaged to continue testing, the decision was made to cut the test session short and return to Charlotte, N.C.