James: Everything lining up for Kyle Busch in three-win blitz
LOUDON, N.H. — Kyle Busch is becoming unstoppable in ever ridiculous ways.
Even he struggles to believe it sometimes.
It was remarkable enough that Busch returned from a broken leg and foot after missing the first 11 Sprint Cup races of the season. Then he went out and won three times in the next eight races — which also happens to be three of the last four and two in a row — after using a bawdy move and a timely caution to come from a lap down to win Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Now what? A championship run? Perhaps, but this part of the far-fetched tale has to play out first.
Busch returned from the possible season-ending injury sustained in the first Xfinity Series race of the season needing certain pinholes to line up for him. The first aligned when NASCAR, contrite that the concrete wall his car impacted at Daytona International Speedway wasn’t swathed in a SAFER Barrier, waived the requirement that drivers attempt to qualify for every race to be eligible to qualify for the Sprint Cup postseason. Still, he’d need to finish in the top 30 in driver points and mostly likely need multiple wins to dent the 16-driver Chase field.
He’s quickly checking boxes.
That Busch has pressed hard for the postseason is no surprise, given the striking talent he has at time harnessed and other times seemed to squander in a fitful 11 fulltime seasons at NASCAR’s highest level. But the blitz of the last month has been somewhat unbelievable.
“Everything is working in our favor right now,” he said after winning Sunday. “We’re doing the right things at the right times.”
Winning on the physically demanding Sonoma Raceway road course with a foot stabilized by a metal plate figured to be his wonder stroke until Sunday. That’s when providence seemed to begin drafting him to the Chase, too.
Busch raced himself back onto the lead lap at New Hampshire with 49 laps remaining when he diced his car between leader Kevin Harvick and Brad Keselowski just before a caution for fluids in Turns 3 and 4. Having pitted just a few laps earlier, he stayed out to lead and neither Keselowski on two new tires nor eventual third-place finisher Kevin Harvick on four could catch him.
“I keep saying we got to pick and choose our battles,” Busch said, “and that was a battle right there that obviously we were in a hurry and we needed to do the right things to be on the lead lap, if there were a caution to come out with all the oil that was on the racetrack.”
Harvick did not offer a tussle as the caution came. Keselowski crew chief Paul Wolfe didn’t realize Busch would assume the lead, he said.
“I realized he was one down when we were racing him and he was trying to get his car back. But when we were rolling down pit road, I missed that he was still going to be out there and be the leader,” he said. “With knowing that, I maybe would have done four tires and had a shot.”
Busch entered the race needing to close 87 points and five points positions on Cole Whitt, possessor of the 30th slot in driver points. He left New Hampshire 33rd in points, 58 points behind new 30th-place David Gilliland.
That doesn’t seem like much with seven races left in the regular season.
“I said before when we won Sonoma with Kyle, it was a great sports story,” team owner Joe Gibbs said. “I think this only adds to it.”
But it doesn’t complete it.
A mid-summer of success may have once signaled a championship run in the Sprint Cup series, but the elimination-style format of the new Chase makes lightning — like the kind crackling around the speedway Sunday — hard to bottle. But Adams Stevens, a first-year Cup crew chief, is making astute calls, and Busch is applying his considerable talent and wedging himself and his speedy Joe Gibbs Racing car through every gap that presents itself after missteps early in his return at Dover and Michigan.
“I don’t have any fears of being able to close that gap,” Stevens said.
Not if weeks like these keep lining up.
Follow James on Twitter @brantjames
PHOTOS: Behind the wheel with Kyle Busch