Kurt Busch became only the fourth driver to win at least three straight NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series races at Bristol Motor Speedway, joining Fred Lorenzen, Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip.
The win was Busch’s ninth NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series win and fourth at Bristol. In addition, the win was Ford’s 30th at BMS, which is the most for the manufacturer at any speedway currently on the circuit.
Ford has now won 547 all-time series races, which is the most among manufacturers. The win also marked the 77th triumph for Taurus in NASCAR’s top division.
The last nine races won by Ford in the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series have been by Roush Racing drivers (Busch 5, Matt Kenseth 3, and Greg Biffle 1).
KURT BUSCH – No. 97 Sharpie/IRWIN Taurus – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW – “This one by far has got to be the sweetest because of what we had to overcome. I don’t know why the motor wouldn’t run. We had about 1,000 RPM less all day today, which provided for great forward bite so we were able to come off the corner good, but we were junk on restarts and I just couldn’t get the car to handle the right way all day. We’ve got to go back and understand why. It’s just a tribute to this team on how we were able to adjust after Atlanta. We came to Darlington with a new program on what we thought we could do with this new tire and it’s just unreal.” HOW MANY LAPS WERE YOU GOING TO STAY OUT? WHY DIDN’T YOU PIT? “We had 20 laps on our tires and there was about 140 to and I looked up in the mirror and a couple of guys didn’t pit behind me so I just jumped in front of that commitment cone and stayed out. Low and behold, those guys were a lap down so it was a decision I was wrong on and I had to bail myself out. It’s an awesome day for this group. It’s the 40th anniversary for Sharpie. They brought a special paint scheme. Again, we got this thing into victory lane. It’s a phenomenal day. All of our associate sponsors – Coca-Cola, Kraft, Visa, Gillette Young Guns. It’s awesome to be part of this group and just keep digging. It’s one race at a time, but when we get to the final 10 there’s gonna be no holding back. You’ve got to let her rip.”
JEFF BURTON – No. 99 Roush Racing Taurus (Finished 38th) – “I got underneath Kevin (Harvick) and came off two. I came up and he came down. It was both of our faults and we ended up a little worse for the wear, but I’m proud of my guys. We were running well. I should have given Kevin a little more room and he could have given me a little more room.”
RICKY RUDD – No. 21 Rent-A-Center/Motorcraft Taurus (Finished 37th) – “We just blew a tire. We’ve been pushing really bad and I guess it just killed that right-front tire or cut it or whatever. When it blew there was no warning. I just hit the fence really hard.” DID YOU SEE ANY PROBLEMS AS FAR AS TIRE WEAR THIS WEEKEND? “No, we had not seen any problems at all. Some guys had, but we had not.”
ELLIOTT SADLER – No. 38 Pedigree/M&M’s Taurus (Finished 14th) – “We were tight all day long. I mean, the car would just not turn all day long. The guys and Todd made air pressure and track bar adjustments and pulled a spring rubber to fix it, but tight in the middle was all I said all day. We took a gamble in the late going and didn’t pit, hoping everyone else would and everyone behind me did. Then the car was fighting tight again and we just finished in one piece. We have done very well at Texas and are gonna go knowing we dodged a bullet here in Bristol.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DEWALT Tools Taurus (Finished 5th) – “That was a good run. Jamie just got into me by accident down there because I slowed down for the corner and I got back into him here a little bit, but no harm, no foul. He didn’t wreck me. He just knocked me out of the groove and I did the same thing to him. They say nice guys finish last, I guess. I try to be nice and sometimes you feel you’re on the receiving end too much. It’s no big deal. He didn’t wreck. I didn’t wreck, except for when he wrecked me on pit road. That wasn’t necessary, but, other than that, it was a great day for our DeWalt car. We didn’t have a very good car. We just survived all day the best we could and hung in there. We waited until the end and got the track position when we needed it.” WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END? “I don’t know. McMurray got into me after the race was over and wrecked our car after the race. I’m not happy about that because my guys work on the car really hard. What happens under green flag conditions is one thing, but what happens after the race I think is another. I feel bad about that because my guys have to fix these cars and there should be some respect for that. But on the race track he just moved me out of the way and I lost a spot. I got into him a little bit that last lap and moved him up the track and he lost two spots, so I thought we were even. I didn’t think it was big deal. Neither one of us were stuck in the fence and we raced hard for the spot.” WHAT ABOUT YOUR RUN TODAY? “We didn’t have a very good car honestly. We just couldn’t go anywhere. When we were by ourselves we could run pretty good, but when we were in traffic I couldn’t go anywhere. We just survived. We got tires at the right time of the race and made our way back to the front.” WHAT ABOUT KURT? WHAT’S HIS SECRET? “I don’t know. If anybody should know, it should be us because we’re his teammate, but he runs really well here. Jimmy does a great job calling the race to get him in the front when they need to be in the front, which is at the end of the race. He does a good job around here. It’s a pretty big feat to be able to win three in a row here and four out of five. That’s pretty awesome for him.”
MARK MARTIN – No. 6 Viagra Taurus (Finished 23rd) – “We did everything not too good today. We should have qualified better. We should have had better track position and we should have run better, but then we broke our engine anyway. We were pretty lucky to finish that good considering the engine broke with 20 to go. We’re actually fortunate today.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard/Subway Taurus (Finished 12th) – “We were strong all day, we just lost track position through pit sequence. I lost two races here this weekend and had the fastest car on both days. That happens and it’s unfortunate. You just never know what can happen when you pit. Yesterday we just made a simple mistake and today it really wasn’t a mistake, we just should have done something different. The car was really, really good.”
DALE JARRETT – No. 88 UPS Taurus (Finished 21st) – “We’ve had three of those days already and we’ve run only six or seven races. We don’t have a lot to show for it. It’s unfortunate. Part of it is my fault because we got the car a little too tight and that forced us to have to come back in the pits. We were still on our way to a top 10 and the lap traffic is always a problem. I was going around the outside of a car that was gonna clear me by a few cars and he slid up in turns three and four and that made me get out of the gas. From there things just started happening. The 22 and I rubbed and as soon as we rubbed it blew the left-front tire out. That turned what was a pretty decent day into a not-so-good day. But we’re running good. We’ve got a lot of positive things happening there, so we’ll just keep our heads up and go to Texas and hope things will be better.”
JIMMY FENNIG, Crew Chief – No. 97 Sharpie/IRWIN Taurus – WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION WHEN KURT DID NOT COME DOWN PIT ROAD AND STAYED ON THE TRACK? “I was mad (laughing). I was upset because I felt we needed to pit, but Kurt knew what he had and here we are in victory lane.” SO HE BAILED HIMSELF OUT? “Yeah (laughing). No, he knew what he had. He did the right thing. I felt we needed tires, but I’ll tell you one thing I probably have the best guy in the business about taking tire management. He knows how to take care of his tires.” DID THE WAY THE RACE PLAYED OUT WITH ALL THE CAUTIONS AT THE END HELP? “I believe it helped us, but we weren’t wearing tires out. Our tire wear was good, but one thing good is we got heat cycles back on their tires to make it equal to ours. They were hot and cold, hot and cold, so it heat cycled them out. I believe the yellows played in our favor.” KURT IS ONLY THE FOURTH GUY TO WIN THREE IN A ROW HERE. WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT HIM? “It’s just his talent. He’s so talented. He knows what tire to press into the race track where and he knows how to drive this race track. He’s just that talented.” IS PATIENCE HIS BIGGEST IMPROVEMENT? “He’s patient, plus we had a little issue because our car wasn’t running right. It wasn’t running right and the motor was down for some reason. I don’t know if our brakes were dragging or what, but our RPM was off. It’s just patience. We talked about patience before the race even started because nowadays you better be there at the end of 26 races so you can go play for that last 10.”
KURT BUSCH PRESS CONFERENCE – “To Nextel this is our first victory with the new sponsorship and it’s pretty sweet. The whole way they’ve been able to change things around as far as advertisement involvement and they’re making the drivers very aware of them changing the face of our sport. I think it goes along with NASCAR’s ability at Daytona to flex their muscle. It’s for surely a great way to jump into the first half of our season. Today didn’t come without a bunch of adversity. The team did a great job on pit road. One thing we did struggle with all day was the ability to run RPM in the car. I don’t understand. The team will obviously go back and dissect all of our problems. Whether it was the clutch slipping or a brake dragging or just lost the power due to the timing in the engine, I don’t know. Jack might be able to give some insight, but for that matter it gave us a very ill-handling car without that power. I went back probably three or four spots at the beginning of the race. You keep an open mind here. You keep a positive outlook because you never know when somebody is gonna pile it up in front of you or when your car is gonna have a long run like we did. We just kept adjusting on the car – freeing it up, freeing it up. With a little bit of the power missing, it just had a ton of forward bite. That obviously gave us good runs coming off the corner, so we had to generate corner speed. We adjusted throughout the day for that and it drove more like a Busch Series car would. I’ve got no idea what one of those drive like, but I was able to generate corner speed. I kept convincing myself it was like a Busch car, but it’s my Busch car. We were able to stay positive and that long green flag run helped me understand how good our car was on the longer runs. People would be burning their rear tires off and then we went conservative on our right-front camber spring and shock adjustments because we were skeptical of the Goodyear tire and how long were we gonna be able to run. That made the car handle improperly for the first 100 laps, but man, lap 100 of a run? You never get those at Bristol. So the way the race shook out, we had the opportunity to stay out late and I misjudged it. I was reading lapped cars as cars that were staying out, so I made the call. Fennig said, ‘What are you doing?’ Now it’s in my court and I didn’t want to let my team down. Rusty was behind us on the same schedule of tires and then we had Harvick at the end who had fresher tires. So I knew we just had to keep hitting our marks and making sure that we generated corner speed and that would get us to victory lane and we were able to survive Bristol today.”
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – No. 97 Sharpie/IRWIN Taurus – ANY IDEA WITH THE POWER? “I assume the responsibility for anything that goes wrong or breaks. I really can’t say what happened. There was an instance where Kurt was reporting, and I’m sure it was the case, that his clutch slipped. We’ve got to try to understand that. That was early in the race and normally when a clutch slips it will burn out, but that wasn’t the case because he was able to finish and restart OK. I suspect there’s an ignition problem or there’s a fuel supply problem that caused the engine not to run properly in the higher RPM ranges. It’s being torn down for inspection right now and, subsequent to that, we’ll reassemble the car as close as we can to the way it was on the race track and we’ll take it to the chassis dyno and do the diagnostics of it. The pit stop, the strategy was perfect. I watched Sterling Marlin with amazement at how fast he was able to go and then when Kurt stayed out, I missed the fact that they were having a conversation on the radio because I listen to so many different channels. I missed that, so I said, ‘Boy, Jimmy Fennig is the man.’ That’s a call I wouldn’t have made and most of the people on pit road would not have made. As it turned out, I think none of the people would have made the call, but Kurt made the call and has the prerogative to do that. He was in a position to save his tires and he knew what he had and to use it judiciously and be able to make it last.”
KURT BUSCH CONTINUED – CAN YOU DISCUSS THE RED FLAG AT THE END? “An unfortunate circumstance brought out the yellow and you know NASCAR is gonna make it exciting. I immediately radioed in and asked what lap we were on and there were six laps to go, which is one lap before they don’t red flag the race, so you knew it was coming out. They did a great job to clean up the race track and make it raceable for us. The one thing they did, though, that I didn’t agree with was the pace car speed, once we got back underway, was 20 miles an hour. With my car having problems already it wouldn’t even run. I had to run on the apron of the race track and it didn’t really give us a proper opportunity to scrub our tires. They did have to go out and retrieve a piece of debris. A crush panel was laying in turn three from one of the cars that wrecked and that threw the lap number down to two to go and that helped us. Rusty Wallace ran into us right at the perfect point, I think. Going down into turn one with my foot on the floor and my rear tires up in the air, the car was probably blowing out white smoke because it was on the rev chip. I thought I blew it up, but Rusty was underneath us so hard that it lifted the tires off the ground and that enabled me to land back on the race track and him check up. As soon as he checked up, I was back on the gas full throttle just due to the way the car was handling and we were able to stretch it out over those last two laps.”
WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE ANOTHER TRACK LIKE BRISTOL BUILT? “There’s a lot of different venues that NASCAR is studying now and the way that they look at some of the race tracks as far as the heritage and the older part of our sport. It’s great to see that they still want to stick to the roots, but yet we have to go after new fans in new markets and race different style of race tracks. As a driver, I can tell you that Atlanta, Charlotte and Texas all look the same, but they are just unbelievably different. We’ve had a great car in Atlanta the past two years. We’ve had a horrible car at Texas and we’ve had an average car at Charlotte, so that’s why we tested out at Texas this year. It’s a market where they’ve got so many corporate sponsors headquartered in Dallas and the western states. It would be great if they were to take our sport to the upper northwest, maybe Sacramento even, and build an oval such as this or such as Richmond. We need a couple more short tracks mixed into our schedule and that would add a bit more color to our series as well.”
YESTERDAY YOU TALKED ABOUT TAKING CARE OF YOUR CAR AND STAYING OUT OF TROUBLE. THAT WORKED TODAY. “Yeah, I thought that we would end up fading at the end of the race, but there were strategic yellows that came into our plan that you can’t predict. You just have to make yourself available for those opportunities, so we were prepared. We had some of those opportunities come our way with yellows slowing up the field. I heard a great car owner say that equals luck, so I’d say we’ve been as lucky as good in our past few victories here. It’s just a matter that the circumstances today probably made this one the sweetest and overcoming all that adversity. You never know when you’re gonna get an opportunity to run strong, especially at this place because you’re always just trying to make it to the end.” YOU PROBABLY HAD NASCAR’S HUNGRIEST DRIVER ON YOUR TAIL. DID YOU REALIZE THAT? “Yes, sir. That’s for surely a great friend of mine now. We were involved in a Visa agreement together, so we got to spend some time and I talked with Rusty about the streak he has going. You know he was one of the ambassadors for this softer tire. He was one of those pushing NASCAR to try this type of setup and when you come to his house, where he’s won nine races in a row and he hasn’t won in so many races, of course they’re gonna throw a red flag and see if he can get by the 97 car. It was a great race, really. With the yellows coming out at the opportune times for me and not for him, that enabled us to get to victory lane. Last week we saw a car that wasn’t the fastest win, and I’ll go out on that stretch today to say we weren’t the fastest car, but we were able to get to victory lane and continue our streak.”
WERE YOU AWARE OF JIMMY’S ANGER ON NOT PITTING? “Oh yeah, he was upset (laughing). ‘What are you doing,’ was his quote. As laps progressed under yellow, he kept coming up ideas that were against me staying out. I’m like, ‘Alright, alright, alright. We’ve got to put a positive spin on things. You’re trying to make it look like we don’t have a shot at this,’ but I was trying to convince him of different things that I saw from the race car and allow him to be more positive about the situation. So it took a few laps, but with 80 to go he was like, ‘OK, dude. It’s in your court. I’m all behind you now.’ We couldn’t come into the pits because of our tire situation because we would have lost way too many positions, so it was up to me to either fade gracefully or put the car on the line for the win.” DID YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LONG THE TIRES WOULD LAST? “I didn’t take a gamble whatsoever. With that long green flag run, I watched our Sharpie Ford go to the front on 157 laps and I knew the way we ran our camber was less aggressive than other teams, and with the way we were struggling with a bit of the power, we didn’t abuse the rear tires. So I’ve got three cool looking tires that were cooler in temperature that allowed me to run hard and that’s what helped me make the decision to stay out. If we had a different circumstance, I would have thought 80 laps would have been the window for tires, especially at the end of the race. But given we had track position on the field and there were a couple of other cars that stayed out on tires – I thought they were lead-lap cars, but they were lapped cars – so that decision ended up in my favor. It was a lucky call, but yet as far as the driver was concerned that the tires would make it to the end and have competitive lap times.” DO YOU VETO YOUR CREW CHIEF AND NOT HAVE IT WORK OUT SOMETIMES? “Oh, for sure. I can’t remember the last time I decided I was gonna stay out and I know we didn’t win, so this was a great way for the team to work together and for them to give me their full support behind me. They had done their job with the pit stops. Fennig was now researching what cars were on the same tire strategy as us and the team pulled together. Once the call was made, you’ve got to stick with it. I think we’ve been in the past on the other side of the coin and today it just came out positive.”
HOW DID YOU TRY TO PUT THE POSITIVE SPIN ON IT WITH JIMMY? “That’s when I relayed to him that our car was not aggressive at all on the right-front tire and he didn’t know much about the power issue. I mean, we’re running in the top five but he’s kind of like, ‘Oh, the driver is just crying about something.’ But it allowed me to save those rear tires, so I was the one that knew everything about the cars handling characteristics. One thing that I struggle with inside the car is understanding where all the other competitors are and what the general theme is on pit road and that’s Jimmy’s. When I was out on the track, I just told him we were out here for 150-some laps before and we were the best car on the race track late in the run. Now we’ve got track position. We’ve got an ability to see the track cleanly on restarts and with the lapped cars still being an issue with the inside lane we were able to pull ahead.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – WHAT ABOUT THE 17 CAR TODAY? “The 17 car had kind of a rough day. They struggled with track position. Matt qualified his normal 23rd or whatever it was, so he was faced with coming from the back like he said he so often did when he was racing in Wisconsin on his way up. Anyway, he had to come from the back. The car wasn’t great. He got stuck. Robbie made great pit strategy. He kept him out and brought him in at exactly the right time and then left him out and he was able to move up. Had he been three positions further on some of those critical cautions, then the decision might have been the other way and he would have been one of the people who was getting passed rather than one of the people that were passing. Matt can be counted on to get the most out of his car and to keep it in as best shape as it can be, and Robbie can be counted on making good pit calls. I think that Matt maybe a little less likely to make a call himself against Robbie’s than Kurt has proven against Jimmy’s, but the fact is that the crew chief can’t see everything that the driver can. If he knows that he’s got enough tire left and wants to go back and not give up his track position, in my world they’ve got that prerogative. By the same token, the crew chief can’t know how badly a driver needs tires. I’ve had occasions when Mark Martin in particular has been told, probably by Jimmy Fennig, that he should stay out and he says, ‘No, I’ve got to have tires. I’ve got this rear tire killed and I’ve got to come.’ But, anyway, that’s one of the things that the guys work out together. But the 17 had a great day in terms of a good save on a day when their car wasn’t dominant and they struggled for track position.”
KURT BUSCH CONTINUED – THERE WERE THREE CAUTIONS IN THE LAST 35 LAPS, WOULD THAT HAVE MADE A SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE? “Those are things that as a driver you expect at the end of a race, especially at Bristol or a short track for that matter is some caution laps. That only aided us in bringing the car to victory lane because of the amount of laps we were running under caution versus green. The total number of laps probably ended up around 90 on that last set of tires under green conditions. So with that helping in our favor, it still makes it difficult on restarts because the field is bunched up once again and you have another opportunity for cars running side-by-side and that takes away from any type of car to be by themselves and when you’re by yourself on this track that’s the best position to be in.” DID YOU KNOW HARVICK HAD NEWER TIRES AND DID THE DEBRIS AND FINISH HELP? “The debris would have affected us if it wasn’t there, but it would have affected us in a positive way because the 29 would have been all over the 2 and the 2’s hands would have been full because he was on the same tire run as we were. The longer we would have run, Rusty would have had more trouble. Now if I was able to stay in front of him, that’s yet to be seen and we won’t have to worry about that. We got the car to victory lane, but it was a blessing in disguise to have the 29 back there with fresher tires because now Rusty had to play defense as well as offense.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON THE 42 AND 17 AFTER THE RACE? “I have no clue. I neither saw it nor have I talked to anybody about it. I understood from the radio that Matt said that he had gotten spun and whether he was the aggressor and got caught up in it or whether he was the victim, I’ve got no clue.” MATT AND KURT ARE 1-2 IN POINTS. “Kurt is great. He was great in the truck. He was great back home before he came in from Las Vegas and joined us a few years ago. Kurt has learned things that I think he would admit that he probably didn’t know – that have been useful to him about the business that we’re in and how he needs to manage Kurt, so that Kurt can be in control of all his faculties and be able to take advantage of the opportunities there. There are many great challenges in this business and Kurt has matured greatly. I’m speaking without perfect knowledge, but when he came to the truck series he had something like only 75 races is all he’d ever raced in full-sized cars, and none of those were even the kind of distance that the truck races had. So we went from that one year into Winston Cup, so he was really without the grounding in terms of pounding and the things that would frustrate you and temper his personality and his perspective on things. He didn’t have that experience, but he’s been tested under fire in the meantime and I think he’s come through it very well.”
KURT BUSCH CONTINUED – CAN YOU FOLLOW UP ON THAT? “Jack’s right as far as the limited amount of experience. Just going from series to series so quickly, I didn’t have time to make friends or to make enemies. It was a challenge for me just to worry about the race car. Boom, boom, boom, here we are now in Nextel Cup and now there are so many things outside of the car that I hadn’t been exposed to. It would have been great to run two seasons in the Busch Series to understand all of the race tracks because I was running on race tracks that I had never seen before for five years. From one year in the Southwest Tour to Trucks and then to Nextel Cup and then to new tracks like Chicago and Kansas. I mean, the race tracks I had never seen before. And then once you get to learn the drivers and once you get to learn the means of success, which I had before but not at this level, that became a whole new ball of wax. That’s probably where I struggled was understanding the bigger picture and what a driver has to do as a role model, as a team leader and as an individual within this rank.”
DID THE REACTION AT THE END BOTHER YOU? SOME BOTTLES WERE THROWN. “That happens quite often at some of our tracks. At Daytona they threw their seat cushions because they didn’t throw a red at the end, so they got a red this time but the probably didn’t get the winner maybe that they wanted, or it was the fact that we now have won four of the last five. I know when my father did that or when I watched Ron Hornaday do that on the Southwest Series or when I watched Greg Biffle win nine races in his Craftsman Truck Series season in 1999, they booed because they saw a winner so many times. I think that was the reaction today. Obviously, last fall was different and then today – the last name is Busch, but it’s halfway Bristol because this is where we have a lot of success and fans might want to see somebody else win, especially the Rusty Wallace kind of guy. He’s got nine wins here, but they all came at a different part of his career, but now he’s back on his game and he’s one to beat every week, so I think a lot of fans were pulling for him at the end because he might be considered the underdog for a second.” WOULD YOU LIKE TO LAY CLAIM TO THIS BEING YOUR HOUSE? “The way I’ve been explaining it all this week was I’ve watched in the past Rusty win here and DW – drivers before that who have won 3-out-of-4 or 3-for-3 anyhow, I didn’t get a chance to see. I think that’s the likes of David Pearson or Cale Yarborough. Those guys were before us and probably before I was even born, but this race track is really tailored to a different type of guy, a mindset or a setup or just luck. The way that DW was able to win seven in a row here, 12 overall, there’s still a lot of years ahead of me but we’ve gotten off to a great start. This is a great race track to race on. There used to be only 30,000 fans in the early eighties and now there are 160,000. Just as years progress stats are added up and I’d like to say that I’m just renting out a room from Darrell Waltrip or Rusty Wallace, so that we don’t lose track of the proper things and that’s the 2004 Nextel Cup championship or just a top five finish or a win on a specific given date.”
MILD-MANNERED GUYS LOSE THEIR TEMPER HERE. DO YOU JUST EXPECT THAT HERE? “Jack was probably kicking me around in the trailer a little more than usual today because he saw that we had potential for a victory or a good finish. When you talk to Jack and his great words, when you listen to Jimmy Fennig because of the great crew chief he’s been in the past with Mark Martin. There are so many guys to learn from within our organization, it’s easy to find a mindset for each specific race track. When I come here, I’m able to feel the race track – each specific bump, any place to stand on the gas, any place to turn the wheel. With it being only 15 seconds, my brain can handle that capacity.” HOW DID YOU FEEL AFTER NOT PITTING? “You don’t feel confidence at all until the checkered flag drops as far as how your decision went or how you were able to get to victory lane. What I did see at the time was cars pitting, cars not pitting, us staying out on tires. We had a problem with the way that our 40th anniversary Sharpie car was running and I didn’t expect to get to victory lane today – more so than any other time. To come over that adversity and to be able to survive out front with a fresh race track to look at and to hit our marks, it allowed me to do my job a little better. But at the time I was just looking to fade gracefully and see where we were gonna end up.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – HOW DOES KURT’S SUCCESS COMPARE TO MARK’S? “The race track is just great for a guy with a lot of courage and with the ability to feel his car and understand exactly what his car is doing all the time. It’s critical when you’re on the gas. There’s not a place here, I think, where a driver can take a breath and kind of relax. You have to be thinking about where you’re gonna go in the corner and how you’re gonna get through the corner and get off the corner. If you say how is Mark and Rusty and Kurt alike as it relates to this race track, I think they love race tracks where you need to have a lot of courage to go through the corner. You go through at break neck speed and where you set up you car so that you almost do a wheel stand coming off the corners. That’s the thing I’ve seen from Rusty when I’ve seen his cars at their best and what I’ve seen from Mark when his were at his best, and that’s the thing Kurt when looking for when he and Jimmy started here a few years ago.” MORE COMMENTS. “I’d like to make a comment. My mother, Georgetta, is the owner of record of this team and she’s been with the team since we started building it about eight years ago around Chad Little. She’s been at my side and she’s been with the guys in the haulers and in the shops, struggling with them and giving her perspective on what she thought we ought to be doing with the team and how we should represent ourselves and what we should be doing. Well, she lost her partner of 65 years last week and he was also my dad, so I’d like to dedicate this race to Charles Roush and Georgetta, who is remembering him tonight.”
KURT BUSCH CONTINUED -- FINAL COMMENTS. “I dedicate the win to them as well. She’s been a unique car owner. We know that Jack makes the decisions, but she calls me up and beats me upside the head when I step out of line, so it’s a great relationship.”
