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BRISTOL, Tenn. — Kyle Busch‘s march toward an undefeated April resumes here this weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway as the Joe Gibbs Racing driver competes in Saturday’s NASCAR XFINITY Series event and Sunday’s Food City 500 Sprint Cup Series race (1 p.m. ET, FOX, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Busch hasn’t “lost” anything since an uncharacteristic 25th place finish at Auto Club Speedway last month.
Well, he did lose his watch; an anniversary present from wife Samantha, but that was last fall before Busch stormed his way to his first premier series title.
“I lost it from last September, but I won the championship (without it) so that was pretty good,” Busch said. “But then I found it before I left for the West Coast swing and we’ve been on a bit of a roll so I don’t know, maybe that had something to do with it.”
Busch, 30, swept the Camping World Truck and Sprint Cup Series races at Martinsville Speedway earlier this month, then won the XFINITY and Sprint Cup races last weekend at Texas Motor Speedway.
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Richard Petty holds the distinction of winning 10 consecutive premier series events in 1967 (he also won six in a row in 1971); Bobby Allison won five straight and 11 other times have seen a driver win 4 in a row, including Harry Gant in 1991.
Gant also won a pair of NASCAR XFINITY races during his September run of success.
Busch has five career Cup wins at the .533-mile track. And he rates his chances at a third consecutive weekend sweep as “really good.”
“It’s been a really good place for me on the (Camping World) Truck side, the XFINITY side and on the (Sprint) Cup Series side,” he said. “But on the XFINITY Series side, I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy as it’s going to be a little different this weekend with the heat races and things like that.
“If we can win a heat and then start up front for the feature and how the pit strategy plays out with it only being 200 laps and seeing what tire wear is all about here, I think we’ve got a really good shot there.
“Then of course we’ve got the 500 lapper on Sunday and that’s going to be harder to figure out, but … we were good here last fall and led a lot of laps, we ran up front and we weren’t very good on the long run.”
Bristol was one of the tracks, he said that he and crew chief Adam Stevens attempted to address with an eye toward this weekend’s Food City 500.
In August of 2010, Busch pulled off the first triple sweep in NASCAR, winning the Truck Series, XFINITY Series and Sprint Cup Series races at BMS. Last year’s Food City 500 was one of 11 Cup races he missed after suffering injuries in a hard crash in February at Daytona International Speedway.
He returned in August to finish eighth in the annual night race.
“I’d like to think that there’s a good shot to (sweep) here and then we’ll hopefully be talking about whether we can do it or not at Richmond,” Busch said. “It would be a pretty good story.”