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JOLIET, Ill. – Kyle Busch won the pole but it’s unclear who won the war of words.
Busch will start out front in Sunday’s opening Playoff race at Chicagoland Speedway, the Tales of the Turtles 400 (3 p.m. ET, NBCSN, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), thanks to a blistering lap of 187.963 mph around the 1.5-mile track.
But the remarks between Busch and Team Penske driver Brad Keselowski virtually overshadowed Friday’s qualifying efforts.
A social media volley following the day’s first practice session was still simmering long after Busch had shot his No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota into the top slot hours later.
“We are all in for a rude awakening. Haven’t seen NASCAR let a manufacturer get this far ahead since the 70s,” Keselowski, who drives the No. 2 Ford for Team Penske, posted via Twitter after Toyota teams led by Busch posted the top four times in the day’s lone practice session.
Toyota teams were quick to respond.
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“Were you alive in the 70s?” asked Cole Pearn, crew chief of points leader and Toyota teammate Martin Truex Jr.
JGR teammate Denny Hamlin posted: “NASCAR is showing favoritism to @ToyotaRacing when did this start? … Concentrate on your own program bro.”
Busch acknowledged that there “probably” were mind games being played in the garage as teams ramp up for the 10-race, championship-determining Playoffs, but then called Keselowski “any idiot anyways.”
“Overall, I would say the biggest thing is that you don’t hear anyone else complaining like he is – it’s just one guy,” Busch said after winning the pole, his seventh of the season and the 26th of his career.
“We work on what we work on and we weren’t complaining when (Team Penske) were fast and they won the championship knowing what they were doing we had to go to work and figure it out. It just seems like those things aren’t happening. All in all, I just have to give thanks to our guys. They do the work and they do a great job, they build fast race cars and it’s fun to drive fast race cars.”
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Busch, the 2015 champion, is third in points entering this weekend’s playoff race; he trails Truex by 24 points and second-place Kyle Larson (Chip Ganassi Racing) by four.
“If you ask Brad he can fix the world’s problems, that’s all there is to it,” Busch said, crediting any perceived advantages to nothing more than hard work and preparation.
“He thinks that somehow the big brother is going to come up and help him,” Busch said. “I don’t know what the point is, we all just work hard and do our jobs, we’ve gotten to where we are and we’re going to keep doing that.”
Keselowski and his No. 2 team won twice this season, at Atlanta and Martinsville, to earn a Playoff berth. He enters the 10-race battle fourth in points, just 10 behind Busch. Friday, he advanced into the third round of qualifying and will start fifth in Sunday’s 40-car field.
Last month, Keselowski intimated that Toyota teams were sandbagging during qualifying at Michigan International Speedway after Ford teams swept the top three positions.
He said his latest comments were the result of what he felt was “NASCAR’s complete inaction to level the playing field.”
“There are natural cycles where cars, teams, manufacturers … go up and down,” he said. “At the start of the year we were at the top of the cycle. And at this moment we are not where we need to be. With respect to that, we were at the top and it seemed like there were a lot of rules changesto slow us down and now you have cars that are so much faster than the field and the complete inaction by anybody.”
Chevrolet teams have won 10 of this season’s 26 races, while Toyota and Ford teams have won eight apiece.
“We could complain, but Kyle Larson runs too good for all the Chevys to complain,” Hendrick Motorsports driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “If Kyle Larson wouldn’t run so damn good then we’d have an argument.
“I think you have to look at more than just are the Toyotas better or the Fords better or are the Chevys better? It’s really how people run their business and I think the Gibbs guys have been working on how they build cars together as a group across the board and how all the teams work together and I think they’ve really got it going on right now.”
Keselowski called the situation “frustrating” but noted that “winning races is (the result of) more than one thing.
“It always has been and always will be,” he said. “You always like to be close but right now we aren’t close.”