Kyle Busch Going from Running to Winning at Kansas

There were many important statistics that came out of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series’ April trip to Kansas Speedway in Kansas City. But for Kyle Busch, driver of the No. 18 M&M’s Toyota Camry for Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR), the most important notation in the box score included one word – “Running.”

Why was that important? Because in his previous three races at Kansas – which also happened to be the first three events on the track’s newly repaved surface – Busch was not running at the end of 400 miles because of accidents that knocked him out of the race.

So as the series heads back to Kansas for Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400, Busch hopes he can parlay April’s top-15 finish at Kansas and translate it into a solid top-10, or even a win, at a track where misfortune has struck for him so many times.

In that April Kansas race, Busch and crew chief Dave Rogers started from scratch with a brand-new car. They attacked the track in the Heartland of America with a different approach with the hopes that a fresh outlook would produce vastly different results. While a pit road speeding penalty cost them precious track position and an even better finish in the race, the result and effort was much different than the three previous trips. Instead, they were competitive enough to now have much higher hopes heading to Kansas for the start of the Contender Round of this year’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup as one of the top-12 drivers advancing in NASCAR’s playoffs.

Kansas isn’t the only track that has given Busch fits during his career, now in its 10th year as a full-time Sprint Cup driver. Places like Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn and Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth are just two where Busch struggled early in his career, only to bring home wins from those places in recent years by taking a different approach than he did originally.

In fact, Busch has won at 17 of the 23 tracks at which the Sprint Cup Series competes. The only six tracks Busch has failed to reach victory lane in Sprint Cup competition are: Martinsville (Va.) Speedway, Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway, Pocono (Pa.) Raceway, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Homestead-Miami Speedway and Kansas. While there are six tracks where he’s yet to score a Sprint Cup win, Kansas is the only track where Busch has yet to record even a top-five finish, and he’s looking to change that Sunday afternoon.

Despite the dry spell at Kansas in NASCAR’s top series, Busch has tasted success at Kansas in NASCAR Nationwide Series competition – as is the case at most racetracks on the Nationwide schedule – with a victory in 2007, a runner-up finish in 2009, and a pair of third-place runs in 2006 and 2010. Busch also brought home a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series win at Kansas in April, which will no doubt add to his growing confidence on the fast, 1.5-mile oval. However, the best he has to show for his 14 visits to Kansas on the Sprint Cup side is a seventh-place finish in 2006.

So, as Busch heads back to the Heartland this weekend for the fourth race of the Chase, he’ll look to transform “running” to “winning.”

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