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MARTINSVILLE, Va. – Kyle Busch dominated much of Sunday’s STP 500 Sunday at Martinsville Speedway.
But the portion the Joe Gibbs Racing driver didn’t was the most important.
Busch and fellow Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series driver Brad Keselowski accounted for six of the final 18 lead changes at the .526-mile track, but when the Team Penske driver wrestled the lead away with just 43 of the race’s 500 laps remaining, Busch said he knew his day was done.
The culprit wasn’t so much a better No. 2 Ford, Busch said, but a much worse set of tires bolted on during his final pit stop.
“All we did was put four tires on it and it went to junk,” Busch said while standing in front of his yellow No. 18 Toyota on pit road. “I hate it for our guys. They’ve deserved all year much better finishes than what we’ve produced and here’s another one today. Just a frustrating season so far.”
The season’s a mere six races old and while Busch, the 2015 series champion, has yet to make it to Victory Lane, he’s finished third, eighth and now second in his last three starts.
Sunday, in a race that played out under sunny skies and warm temperatures, Busch led seven times for 274 laps. He finished third in the first stage and was headed to a win in the second before contact with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (No. 17 Roush Fenway Racing Ford) allowed Chase Elliott (No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet) to slip underneath and steal the 10-point race bonus and one-point playoff bonus.
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By 13 laps into the final stage Busch was back out front, and for the remainder of the race was rarely out of the top two. But down the stretch, Keselowski’s Ford was faster, and that proved to be the difference.
“Man, we were lights-out faster than those guys after 20 laps or so,” Busch said. “During that last (run) it was at minimum three-tenths slower the entire time and that’s why Brad was able to drive away there at the end.
“We were really, really, really struggling. I’m surprised we held off the 24 (of Elliott), really. but you know overall just not quite getting the finishes we need. … We just need to figure out how to finish better than what we are, or where we are running, and so far we’ve just been finishing worse.”
It was Keselowski’s second victory of the year. Elliott, Joey Logano (Team Penske) and Austin Dillon (Richard Childress Racing) rounded out the top five.
Busch praised the selection of tire Goodyear provided for Sunday’s race, if not his final set, noting that the tire “laid rubber down; we could all move around the race track.
“I don’t know that anybody has ever seen the outside lane work but I was doing it earlier on in the race once the track really got rubbered in,” he said. “It was fun to run that outside edge of the concrete and be able to make some time up there while the rest of the guys were slipping around the bottom.”
Crew chief Adam Stevens said he could find no other explanation for the falloff in speed other than the final set of tires.
“I think it changed the whole outcome of the race, to be honest with you,” Stevens said. “The last two stops we didn’t make any adjustments at all on the car. Nothing. When the caution came out there with what was our last stop we had the discussion, ‘What do you need? How is it?’ He said it was pretty good so we did nothing for the second stop in a row. And it was just a totally different race car.
“The only way to explain that is tire set variation. You have that in big-time auto racing. I wish we had got those goofy tires on earlier or maybe had an opportunity to take them off, that would have been nice. But we didn’t. So we got a second place … still an improvement over our recent finishes so we’ll take that and build on it.”
If it sounds like sour grapes, Stevens knows it will pass. He’s seen it before; his team’s been on the winning end under circumstances equally unexpected.
“The best car doesn’t always win,” he said. “We’ve run how ever many races this year and I think the best car has won one time. We’ve won a couple in our history when we weren’t the best car. If we keep putting ourselves in position to win, we’ll win plenty.”