LONG POND, Pa. -- The bonfire necessary to win the 2007 Nextel Cup championship was ignited years ago, in Roush Racing team meetings.

Kurt Busch and Pat Tryson -- who five races ago teamed up as driver and crew chief on Penske Racing's No. 2 Dodge -- just didn't know it at the time.

But Busch has learned the support he has from Tryson.

"Absolutely," Busch said while standing on Pocono Raceway's pit road Friday afternoon. "The guy would lay on the train tracks in front of a train to stop it from hitting me and I'd do the same thing for him. That's a great misperception of what fans have led themselves to believe about me, that I get fired up [against his crew chief and team].

"I have that great tenacity, that fire in the belly. There are guys like Tony Stewart that have that -- everybody in this garage area has it -- and maybe I just look a little different and I should have worked on the persona or personality more when I came into this sport. I'm just a racer, just like every one of them. I could be sitting in the grandstands enjoying a NASCAR race on Sundays just as easy as I could be driving in it."

But the fact is, heading into Sunday's Pennsylvania 500 at Pocono, a racetrack where Busch won in 2004 and scored two second-place finishes last season, he and his crew chief have added the latest exclamation point in their campaign to make the Chase for the Nextel Cup.

After last weekend's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, Busch is only 13 points behind 12th-place Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the standings that will set the 12-man field for the Chase with just six races remaining until the playoff.

"It's going to be a battle here, I think, depending on what happens in the next few weeks," Tryson said. "I'm sure it's going to be pretty tight and it will go right down to Richmond, and hopefully we'll get in -- in fact that both of us get in, including Ryan [Newman, teammate]."

Busch will start Sunday's race from the second position, as he was aced out of his first Bud Pole in 24 races by Earnhardt's late run after a 45-minute rain delay of qualifying.

It was the latest highlight in the five-race tear that's seen Busch pick up three positions in the standings and a more significant 131 points on the vital 12th position.

The best aspect is that the merging of two fiery individuals has created a thriving team environment, despite a less-than-stellar reaction from the grandstands in response to Busch's success.

"I think there's a misconception that people don't think he's a real good guy. He's an awesome guy," Tryson said. "He does a lot of good things for these guys on this race team and that's important. The part that people misconstrue is that people listen on their scanners and when he gets upset they misinterpret it -- because what people don't understand is that every one of these drivers in here that runs really well does the same thing. That's what makes them good -- they want to win so bad that sometimes they get a little mad and frustrated when things aren't going well. But it's only because they want to win and you can't take that away from them because it makes them what they are."

Apparently, a lot of fans don't know that Busch's track record includes 230 race-day visits to his souvenir trailer to sign autographs in 240 career starts -- which he'll continue Sunday morning from 9:45-10:15 a.m.

It's no news to Tryson, who shared plenty of meeting room time with Busch when they toiled together at Roush, where Tryson had a three-year, championship-contending stretch with Mark Martin from 2004-2006 while Busch won the Nextel Cup championship in 2004 with crew chief Jimmy Fennig. (Continued)