BRISTOL, Tenn. -- Some races, you take what you can get and go home.

So on a day when right-front tires were coming apart and sending guys careening into the outside walls at Bristol Motor Speedway, Kyle Busch and his No. 18 Toyota team had to admit they were pretty pleased to salvage a ninth-place finish in the Food City 500 on Sunday. That kind of result seemed out of reach after Busch had a tire go down and slapped the wall roughly halfway through the race.

“

We worked from behind all weekend long. But the guys never gave up and I never gave up and somehow we got a decent finish out of it.

”

-- KYLE BUSCH

Afterward, Busch admitted he is trying to keep his eyes on the larger prize -- making the 12-driver Chase field that will battle it out for the championship in the final 10 races of the long season. Sunday's race was only the fifth of the season's 36-race schedule.

"We want to run better, but you need to make the bad days the best you can if you want to make the Chase and have a shot at a championship," said Busch, who swept both Bristol races a year ago but failed to make the Chase. "We did what we needed to do [Sunday]."

They did -- and they certainly were not alone in having tire issues. But both Dave Rogers, who is Busch's crew chief, and J.D. Gibbs, president of Joe Gibbs Racing which fields Busch's car, openly admitted that the tire problems experienced not only by Busch but also by their other two cars -- the No. 11 driven by Denny Hamlin and the No. 20 driven by pole sitter Joey Logano -- were unexpected.

"It was for us, because generally we're on the conservative side of stuff," Gibbs said. "And so I think obviously we have to look at if we were doing something different, because all three of our guys had issues. Once you look at yourself, even at the end there, Joey ran real conservatively and still ended up having more problems.

"We'll have our [research-and-development] people looking into it. It will be interesting looking around the garage and seeing who had what kind of issues and what was the cause." (Continued)