TALLADEGA, Ala. — Kyle Busch was not a happy camper pulling into Talladega Superspeedway for one good reason: He always crashes.
Well, until Sunday, that is, and even then it was a near-run thing.
“I wreck every time I come here; so what’s there to be excited about except a tore-up race car?” Busch said about coming to Talladega. “But I am now, and that’s pretty cool.”
Busch overcame being a lap down and an on-track incident with Jamie McMurray to win the race — something the old Kyle Busch probably would have had a hard time doing.
“I’d like to say I’m smarter than I look, but that’s certainly not the case,” Busch cracked in the post-race interview. “You know today was just due to having a great car. Mark (Cronquist) and all those guys at the shop did an awesome job building a great Toyota engine today and in order to power us up through there through the field when we were getting bumped and banged all over the place. But getting a lap down, yeah, that was like typical Talladega there, and I didn’t wreck today, so I am ultimately happy about that.”
In six previous starts, Busch finished 32nd or lower in five of them. The lone exception, an 11th-place run in the fall race of 2006, was an anomaly.
“[I was] greatly appreciative that I was able to win today because it’s just been a struggle here at this place for certainly a couple years, and I don’t think I’ve ever finished one here yet without having some sort of damage.
“Today we still had damage, but it wasn’t enough to keep us from victory lane.”
One writer asked Busch how it felt to have the start to a season that he has this year — two NASCAR Sprint Cup victories, three in the Nationwide Series and two in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series — and compared it to the kinds of seasons people who play video games have.
“I do better on video games than I do in real life,” Busch cracked.
“I haven’t caught a breath because J.D. [team president J.D. Gibbs] won’t give me a weekend off,” he laughed. “I won’t be catching many breaths going on from here. It’s good times, but I just don’t know what to put it all on exactly.
“I guess I’m a decent enough driver that when you give me a good enough car, we can do something with it, put it in the right position and we’re able to run up front and do well.”
Crew chief Steve Addington sat Busch down last week at the shop and told him that he had to be patient to win at Talladega.
“I’m really proud of him being patient,” Addington said. “When we got the last — we got behind Tony (Stewart), we were a lap down, if we could just hang in there, we had a good enough car there, if we could get our caution — he was so patient when we were there in the back of the pack.
“He took his time coming up there.”