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SHOP: Kyle Busch gear
LONG POND, Pa. — Three hundred and seventy-two days.
Kyle Busch had more than a full calendar year to sit and ponder when Win No. 39 was coming his way.
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver got his answer Sunday at Pocono Raceway, wheeling his dominant No. 18 Toyota to Victory Lane for the first time in his career at the Tricky Triangle.
The drought, however, certainly wasn’t for lack of trying — or speed.
Sunday’s pole-winner has had plenty of promising races foiled in between the pair of front-row-to-Victory-Lane stompings — he led 149 of 170 laps in his Brickyard win last year — but for reasons one or another, victory eluded the 2015 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion for 36 straight races.
Exactly a full season’s worth.
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There was last year’s Bristol night race, where a stout No. 18 Toyota led a race-high 256 laps — and was saddled with a 39th-place finish after a crash. Another 274 laps led at Martinsville earlier this year before ceding the lead late to rival Brad Keselowski for a runner-up finish. Or the runner-up finish in the 2017 Coca-Cola 600 (you know, the mic toss finish.) Or the squandered poles at Dover, June’s Pocono race, Kentucky and Indy.
The list could go on.
Sunday’s win didn’t feel like it was about luck finally breaking through. It felt like it was about time.
“It’s pretty cool, finally just being able to get the monkey off our back and get to Victory Lane this year,” Busch said. “It’s been a long time coming. It’s well-documented; it’s been over a year. We find it very rewarding to achieve victory, especially here at Pocono in M&M’s back yard, with one of their main plants over there in Hackettstown (New Jersey), so we appreciate being able to go see all those guys and gals on Thursday and having them invite us over and giving the team guys and their spouses tours and what not. It was fun to do that and, of course, to be able to get to Victory Lane with this team with Adam (Stevens, crew chief) and all the guys.
“It’s not due to lack of effort; it’s not due to lack of speed. We’ve certainly figured out a lot different ways to lose those races this year, but it feels really good to capitalize on having a fast car and Adam making a really good decision there to kind of long-stint that last run and put tires on late. It really paid off for us.”
With 16 to go, the 18 got around the No. 4 of Kevin Harvick for the lead after the Stewart-Haas Racing driver got loose and incited minimal contact between the two. It took off from there.
A caution seemed certain to fall in the closing laps — surely, something would spoil this for Busch and Co. But as the laps ticked off, the laps stayed clean.
And just like that, the drought was over.
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All of a sudden, the conversation shifted from focusing on the season-long strength of the Nos. 42 and 78 of Kyle Larson and Martin Truex Jr. to the realization that Busch has been equally strong, just without the occasional champagne-soaked celebrations.
Busch’s No. 18 has led 1,114 laps, 392 more than Larson and just 177 less than Truex’s series-leading 1,291. He has eight top-five finishes — the same as Truex and one less than Larson.
The title picture right now is clearly three-wide, with perhaps a quickly-improving No. 2 team of Brad Keselowski approaching.
That could be your Championship 4, and seeing Busch in that group has long made sense, but the win may have validated that notion.
“We normally tend to fly under the radar most times, but it’s not something that I need to go out and beat our chest to say that we should be in the conversations. That’s for other people to decide,” he said. “I think our stats and our runs and our speed shows for itself. Those guys have just been able to capitalize on race victories and that’s what we haven’t been able to capitalize on. It kind of goes, every once in a while, that we’re not all that flashy, you know … we just methodically go about our races and that’s our mentality and when it works for us we go to Victory Lane.
“And that’s how we get to Homestead.”