Kyle Busch didn’t have the result he had hoped for in Saturday night’s Federated Auto Parts 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Richmond (Va.) International Raceway.
With four victories and four runner-up finishes to his credit in his previous 19 Sprint Cup starts at the .75-mile track, the driver of the No. 18 M&M’s Camry for Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) had hoped to once again be a contender for the win at Richmond on Saturday night.
However it was not meant to be, as Busch struggled with a loose-handling racecar for much of the night. Crew Chief Dave Rogers and the M&M’s team tried a series of adjustments throughout the course of the race to help the ill-handling racecar, but nothing seemed to fix the handling issues, resulting in a 14th-place finish.
“We struggled a bit tonight, but we struggled as a company as well,” Busch said. “Richmond is normally a place that we like coming to that we run well at, and tonight it just wasn’t it. I thought the race tonight was pretty good. There were options, and you could move around. I was stuck to the bottom. I tried to move around a few times and just couldn’t find anything that would work for me any better than where I was at. Made it a little bit frustrating for myself and our M&M”s team, but we fought through it hard and battled and came home with a top-15 – not what we wanted.
“Tonight’s over and now we move on to the Chase, and we look forward to that. I felt like we had a good test at Chicago a few weeks ago, we ran well earlier this year at Loudon so those two first ones coming up in the Chase. The guys are working hard – I can’t say enough about my M&M’s guys , all the 20 (Matt Kenseth) team, the 11 (Denny Hamlin) team – they’re all putting in the hours and doing everything they can it’s just we’re not reaping the benefits of that yet. There’s still 10 more weeks to go and we hope we can.”
Busch’s JGR companions – Denny Hamlin, driver of the No. 11 Toyota Camry, and Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 20 Toyota Camry – finished 21st and 41st, respectively.
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