The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie 300 - Kyle Busch Notes

KYLE BUSCH

NO. 5 LOWE’S / BRIGGS & STRATTON

CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO

LOWE’S MOTOR SPEEDWAY PREVIEW

TEAM NO. 5’s HISTORY AT LOWE’S MOTOR SPEEDWAY: Team No. 5 has three top-five finishes in five Busch Series races at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. With driver Kyle Busch, the team started on the outside of the front row and claimed a win here in the May 28 Busch Series event.

KYLE BUSCH’S HISTORY AT LOWE’S MOTOR SPEEDWAY: Lowe’s Motor Speedway (LMS) was the site of Kyle Busch’s first career start in the NASCAR Busch Series. Driving the No. 87 Chevrolet for NEMCO Motorsports, Busch qualified fifth and finished second. In May of this year, Busch qualified second and won the event in Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 5 Team Lowe’s Racing Chevrolet, marking the second victory of his Busch Series career.

Q&A WITH DRIVER KYLE BUSCH:

You’ve won at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in May, and it’s your favorite track. Did you learn anything new when you tested here last month? “We learned a few things. I learned exactly how Jimmie (Johnson, Busch’s Hendrick Motorsports teammate) drives the track versus how I drive the track. We could overlay the map tracks and traces and things like that. It was pretty cool to be able to do that, and it was also a lot of fun to test with Jimmie, because he’s got such a great history there. We tried some different kind of spring and shock packages to see what we could figure out. We couldn’t do exactly what Jimmie was doing in terms of setup, but we found something in between what he ran and what I ran, so I think we’ll be good.”

This is the first time this season you’ve had a teammate in the Busch Series that you could compare notes with. Was that helpful? “Oh, absolutely. We were technically driving the exact same car, because the Busch team built that car for Jimmie to run. They unloaded with the same setup I had and Jimmie was pretty happy with it, then they started going off on their own way. It was pretty cool the way the two teams worked together and traded some information.”

Since they’re impounding the cars after qualifying, what are your goals for the first practice session on Thursday? “Basically, we’re going to go out there and warm the car up and get everything all ready to go for qualifying. We’ll make a few qualifying runs and not change a thing, because we know from the test how the track should be when go back to race on Friday night.”

Q&A WITH CREW CHIEF LANCE McGREW

You won at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in May in a daytime race, but Friday’s race is at night. How different is the track from day to night? “It’s quite a bit different setup to go from day to night. The Busch Series doesn’t race at Indianapolis (Motor Speedway), but I understand that it’s the only place that even comes close to being as temperature sensitive as Lowe’s Motor Speedway. From day to night, the place is so different. Seeing that they’re impounding cars after qualifying and we practice in the middle of the day, it will hopefully give us a leg up on those guys who didn’t go test.”

Why do you think the track is so temperature sensitive? “I don’t know if it has something to do with the oil content in the asphalt, or if it’s the amount of wear on it or what. Whoever poured the asphalt for that track, wherever they got their materials from, I don’t know if there’s too much oil in the asphalt mix than there needs to be or if there’s not enough oil or what it is. You can go out there and make a handful of laps, come into the garage and make no changes and go back out, and you’ll be a half second slower and not really know why. It’s kind of crazy.”

Your Hendrick teammate, Jimmie Johnson, is also competing in the Busch race. How closely did you and Chad Knaus, Jimmie’s crew chief, work together during the test? “We worked side by side during the test, but once you go back to race, since we only have the one practice session, qualify and then impound the cars, there won’t really be an opportunity for me to run down to his garage stall and ask him what’s going on. If there were a happy hour, we’d talk to each other and find out what the other team is going to try, but with the schedule being the way it is, he knows where I’m at and I know where he’s at (in terms of setups), and that’s probably as close as we’re going to get.”

Kansas Speedway looked like a real chance to make up a lot of points, but it was not to be because of being caught up in an accident. What do you say to the team after something like that? “All you can do is say, ‘Hey, we had a good racecar.’ We didn’t get the finish that we probably deserved to get, but we keep putting good racecars on the racetrack. As a team contending for the championship, that’s all you can do. You can’t control the accidents or anything. In hindsight, we maybe ‘coulda’, woulda’, shoulda’’ played it safe and dropped back on the restart and let everyone sort it out ahead of us and finished as the last car on the lead lap and we would have still come out way ahead, but we were there to win the race and put on a show for the fans, too.”

CHASSIS INFORMATION- Hendrick Motorsports Chassis No. 312- Chassis No. 312 is the car Kyle Busch qualified second with at Kentucky Speedway in June. A crash in final practice forced the No. 5 team to bring out a backup car for the race.

STATS & FACTS