One race, and suddenly Busch is facing big deficit

LOUDON, N.H. -- Kyle Busch took off his helmet, climbed out of his crumpled and bandaged racecar, and walked down the long corridor between team transporters without saying a word. Then he vanished, just like his lead in the Sprint Cup standings.

All those race wins. All those bonus points. All that work the first seven months of the season to cement himself as the championship favorite and the top seed in the Chase. All of it gone after a sudden and startling series of events Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. A broken mechanical piece, a pit road penalty, a spin, a crash -- when it was all over Busch found himself with a 34th-place finish, and out of the Sprint Cup points lead for the first time in 18 weeks. In one overcast afternoon he went from 30 points in front to 74 points behind, a plummet that left him so steamed he evaded the media, jumped into a golf cart, and was spirited away without comment.

"You can imagine," team owner Joe Gibbs said, when asked about Busch's level of disappointment. "He's raced all year to get here. We haven't had failure problems, really. That one really hurt. But sometimes in racing, that can happen to us. He was really down. It was one of those things too, I know what kind of a competitor he is, and you've got to come roaring back and find a way to make it."

Still, it may take some time to get over the sting of Sunday, which left Busch -- who hadn't been lower than fifth in points all season -- in eighth place. The usually reliable No. 18 car was left fishtailing and scraping the wall only 19 laps into the event, the result of a broken heim joint, which connects the vehicle's left side sway bar to the lower control arm. With the piece unhooked, the yellow Camry was a rolling wreck (watch video). In the garage after the race, the Joe Gibbs Racing brain trust of Gibbs, team president J.D. Gibbs, vice president Jimmy Makar, car chief Wesley Sherrill and crew chief Steve Addington all stood in a circle examining the small metal piece that had turned the day so disastrous.

"As soon as the race was over with, we went out and tried to find the part that we had the problem with, and we found it," Addington said. "We'll take it back and analyze it and see what we can do to make a better piece, and make it more bulletproof than what we had. We've run it for a long time, and it broke today. It sucks that it was today, at the beginning of the Chase."

Joe Gibbs said he couldn't recall a similar failure in the 17-year history of his organization. "I think you've got to say, hey, look, it's something that happened and got taken away from us," Gibbs said, "and there was nothing we could do about it."

Its failure led to one problem after another. The No. 18 car was so loose, Addington urged Busch to just try and hang on until a NASCAR-issued competition caution on Lap 35. By the time it arrived, Busch had fallen from first -- he started on the pole because qualifying had been rained out and the field set on points -- to 26th. Pit road was closed, but Addington told his driver to come in anyway. They'd incur a back-of-the-line penalty, but they were headed there regardless. Trying to stay on the lead lap, Addington sent Busch back out before the field passed him, with orders to come back in the next time around. But then, on Lap 37, NASCAR determined that Busch had "pulled out to pit" -- passed cars under yellow to reach pit road. The penalty: one lap. (Continued)