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.

"It helps a lot just because I know him and he knows me and it just makes you feel more comfortable with each other," Tryson said of the days at Roush. "Mark [Martin] will tell you [Busch] was the best teammate we had when we were [at Roush] so it just makes everything real comfortable and hopefully it'll keep getting better from here on out."

"We used to sit in on the same driver and crew chief meetings and I got a taste of [Tryson] then, and how he talked about his team and his weekends," Busch said. "You could tell he's a car guy. He doesn't sugar coat things. If he had a bad race, he'd say, 'We didn't have the right equipment.'

"I like that in a guy, who's able to admit a mistake or who's smart enough to know what to change next time. So that's really blended in well with our program at Penske Racing. He can't change the world right off, but if we can do small things each and every race, that's what's added up, so far."

Busch's move into contention for the Chase, which he missed in his debut season with Penske a year ago, is centered on Tryson.

Busch said Roy McCauley and Troy Raker, who previously held his crew chief position this season, were competent leaders but lacked one element that Tryson brings to the table, or pit box.

"Pat Tryson has brought a great deal of experience to our team -- the comfort level that Pat has on the pit box," Busch said after Friday's qualifying. "Our guys have latched on to him real well and the guys have started to feed off that.

"They like his willingness to jump on in there and change control arms and get his hands dirty and just his different practices. He's not there like the engineer crew chief is, looking at the computer and checking this and that -- he's going off of his past experiences over the past couple years."

But Tryson said it's more than turning a wrench.

"I think everybody's just slowly gaining confidence in everything that we're doing," Tryson said. "We keep working on our stuff, trying to make it better. This [Pocono] car is a car [Busch] wrecked at Charlotte that we think we made better.

"It means a lot, when guys can grow in confidence and they really get along, it makes your weekend go a lot nicer. When everyone can joke around and have a little fun [it's great] -- but everyone is confident in what's going on. The driver is comfortable with everyone, because a driver's confidence in everyone is a huge factor in this sport. Kurt's doing an awesome job and he's obviously a NASCAR champion so if we get our stuff together we can get in the Chase and maybe have a shot at winning it."

The feeling goes deeper among Penske's men. So says no less an expert than Jeffrey Thousand, who toiled with Rusty Wallace for the team from 1991 through Wallace's retirement at the end of 2005 -- which led to Busch's hiring.

"There is something special there now and you can just feel it," Thousand said. "I think a lot of it is due to Pat Tryson coming aboard.

"I was here back in '93 and '94 when Buddy Parrott was our crew chief. Buddy was a super team leader -- like a great coach -- and he got the most out of everybody on our team. He had Rusty's confidence and trust. He was like a general leading his troops into battle up on the pit box on race days. I told Pat there at Indy on Sunday that he reminds me so much of Buddy Parrott. I think that's the direction our team is headed in."

No one in the organization would complain about that. Parrott and Wallace, in 61 races during 1993-94, had 18 victories, while Wallace finished second in the standings in 1993 and third in 1994.

Busch has recognized Tryson's strengths and equates them to something he has intimate experience with, which also had title implications.

"The way I looked at Pat's deal, when he was released at Roush Racing [earlier this season]," Busch said, "was that I would pick him because he's got the drive and he's separated himself as a top, elite crew chief -- and he's available.

"That's what made him mesh so well with our program, and I'll get back to his experience level: He reminds me a lot of Jimmy Fennig when we sat in those meetings, and he's shown me that already at Penske."

Tryson said the feeling's mutual.

"At Indy, we were able to take a potentially bad day and make a decent showing out of it," Tryson said. "Kurt Busch proved that he is a true champion-level driver out there."

Busch qualified sixth at Indianapolis, but endured an accident on pit road and two penalties from NASCAR to end up 11th, which when compared to Earnhardt's 34th-place finish after engine failure was a sizeable points gain.

"It seems like they threw every possible kind of adversity at him during the race and he was able to bounce back," Tryson said. "It was a day when our team got everything we possibly could -- and then some -- out of it."

Again, Busch said the fact that his crew chief would do the ultimate to support his driver was a huge vote of confidence for him to feed off of.

The fire continues to grow, evidenced by Tryson's reaction when told that Thousand, who now serves on Busch's race day support crew on the box, had compared him to Parrott.

"That's about the biggest compliment I could get, I think," Tryson said. "That's the most success that Roger [Penske] has enjoyed in NASCAR so far and Buddy has always been a hero and great friend of mine.

"Notice that I said so far, because we're planning on getting Penske Racing a Cup championship."