Busch’s Penske Dodge Crushes Cup Field At Pocono

LONG POND, Pa. — They hadn’t been to victory lane since April 2006, and it was being said that Penske Racing’s two-car Nextel Cup team had been surpassed by the three-, four- and five-car teams of their ever-expanding rivals.
It was whispered that Kurt Busch had made a bad career decision by abandoning Roush Racing to succeed Rusty Wallace in the No. 2 Dodge.
After Sunday’s rout of the field by Busch in the Pennsylvania 500, the critics of Penske Racing and Kurt Busch were nowhere to be found.
The 2004 Nextel Cup champion made the might of Hendrick, Roush-Fenway and the rest of the multi-car super teams look like the freshman squad after scrimmaging the varsity. 
Busch led 175 of the 200 laps — seven out of every eight circuits — to set a Pocono record. On the only occasion when he lost the lead on a pit-stop sequence, it took him only a handful of laps to move from eighth to the front of the pack by passing Dale Earnhardt, Jr. on lap 153. He beat Earnhardt to the checker by 4.1 seconds, but it might as well have been the length of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Denny Hamlin, the double winner in 2006 at Pocono, failed in his last-ditch bid to unseat Earnhardt and settled for third, followed by Hendrick teammates Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson.
Tony Stewart, Busch’s teammate Ryan Newman, who ran in the top three much of the afternoon, Clint Bowyer, Mark Martin and Casey Mears completed the top 10.
It was Busch’s 16th-career Nextel Cup victory and his second at Pocono, where he has been first or second in four of the last five races. It was his first victory in 51 starts, the first with Penske for new crew chief Pat Tryson, the first in Cup for Penske in 2007 and the first on an oval track for Dodge in the current campaign.
Perhaps most important, edging Earnhardt and leading the most laps moved Busch into the 12th and final position in The Chase for the Nextel Cup, seven points ahead of Earnhardt.
Explaining how he was able to dominate all day under conditions ranging from bright sunshine at the start to overcast at the finish, the winner pointed to Tryson, the veteran of many victoriess at Roush Racing who is his third crew chief of 2007.
“We went through a few changes in happy hour yesterday,” Busch related. “Pat was trying some big rear springs and big rear shocks, soft springs and heavy front shocks to get the attitude of the car right. We want to see the front end pinned down and the rear end high. Sometimes you can go too far and it makes the car ill-handling, but I think we came up with the best compromise.”
He described the final pass of Earnhardt by saying, “He got real tight into the tunnel turn (turn two), and then it snapped loose on him coming off. I told Pat this weekend that we have to get better in the tunnel turn if we want to win. I feel that’s where it came true.”
Kurt Busch led all but two laps after the Earnhardt pass.
Earnhardt’s second place, backing up his first pole since 2002, was also made possible by a mid-race shock change after he had slid down the standings and spun to a stop at the pit entrance on lap 124, bringing out the caution.
“We started on some crazy front shocks. It was beating (the front end) down on the ground. I talked Tony (Eury), Jr. into changing the left-front shock, and then we got track position by changing two tires,” he explained. 
Just 20 laps after his spin, the two-tire change put him third behind Reed Sorenson and Casey Mears for a restart. He took the lead in three laps to the thunderous approval of the crowd, but had nothing for Busch eight laps later.