Radio spat, slump come at bad time for Kyle Busch

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Nascar

‘Rowdy’ has had finishes 36th-or-worse in the past four races

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Crew chief Dave Rogers said all the right things in the aftermath of Saturday night’s spat with driver Kyle Busch, brushing off the incident at Bristol Motor Speedway as a result of a miscommunication between driver and crew chief.

He didn’t deny that radio conversations got heated, but he also made no apologies for his or his driver’s comments.

Indications are that the two spoke afterward and cleared the air. Rogers, for the record, is still listed as Busch’s crew chief as the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series prepares to head to Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend, so it would seem safe to assume that no major personnel changes have taken place.

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With only two races remaining before the start of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, a strained relationship between crew chief and driver doesn’t make for a winning combination.

The bigger concern for the team is how to stop the slide that has seen Busch, a winner of 29 Sprint Cup Series races, finish 36th or worse in his last four starts.

He and the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing group will be one of the 16 teams participating in this year’s Chase, thanks to a win earlier this season at Auto Club Speedway, but unless they can move past the bickering and find their way back into contention, their stay will likely be a short one.

Busch’s average finishing position since Pocono is a woeful 39.3. You’d have to go all the way back to 2005 (his first full season in the sport’s premier series) and the handful of starts he made in 2004, to find anything close to this bad stretch for Busch.

His one win through 24 races is another oddity, although he had just a single win at this point in the 2012 season. That year, his average finish in the four races before the Atlanta stop was a much more manageable 14.8.

The eight laps he led at Bristol on Saturday night were the first time his Toyota had led laps since New Hampshire (where he finished second), although he also finished second a week later at Indianapolis.

The Indy result capped a four-race run that saw him finish second three times and post an average finish of 8.5, which makes his recent results all the more puzzling.

Busch’s talent behind the wheel is impossible to ignore, but so too is his conduct when things aren’t to his liking. Still, such incidents aren’t the reason for his team’s lack of success. It isn’t the reason the 29-year-old finished second in three of four races or the reason he finished 36th or worse in the next four.

But in both cases, it probably didn’t help.

There’s no way to measure the impact of his reactions on his race team other than to look at the results. And those haven’t been promising.

No doubt he could handle adversity differently. But would that guarantee him a better chance at winning? Not necessarily.

His team has the tools to be among the very best in the series but right now it’s far from it regardless of whether Busch is mad, glad or somewhere in between.

Right now, it’s a team in a funk, and no matter what did or didn’t happen Saturday night, it’s going to take more than simply saying the right things to get it turned around.

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Posted on August 28, 2014 by Nascar

Young driver has four top-10 finishes in six series starts this season

Joe Nemechek thought his driver did "an awesome job."

That it was his son behind the wheel made the finish that much more enjoyable.

"First time at Bristol, never raced here before … I mean right off the get-go he was passing cars," a smiling Nemechek said of his 17-year-old son, John Hunter Nemechek.

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Making just his sixth start of the season in NASCAR’s Camping World Truck Series, and his first on the high-banked half-mile of Bristol Motor Speedway, the younger Nemechek brought his SWM-Nemco Motorsports No. 8 Toyota home with a sixth-place finish in Thursday’s UNOH 200 at Bristol.

"It was a lot of fun," John Hunter said afterward. "We’ve been so close to finishing top-five. I think this is our third sixth-place finish, so if we keep finishing up here we’ll keep gaining on it and hopefully get a top five or a win soon."

Nemechek qualified 13th at Bristol, and cracked the top 10 by lap 40 of the 200-lap event. He stayed inside the top 10 for the remainder of the race, which was run a day later than scheduled due to rain.

"I thought it was going to be a lot more difficult than it was but we had a good truck," he said. "We had it to where it would rotate underneath me and I could get a good drive off underneath them.

"I felt like I adapted pretty quick. It reminds me a lot of Dover. I thought I was going to be stuck in the back, but throughout the race I moved to a bunch of different lines to see what it would do. I definitely learned where to run, just need more experience."

Nemechek is eligible to compete only in races on tracks 1.25 miles in length, as well as the series’ road courses due to his age. Joe Nemechek, team owner and four-time winner in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series, handles the driving duties for the team on the series’ larger tracks. Together, the Nemechek family has the No. 8 truck sitting in sixth place in the owner standings with Joe earning his second-best finish in the series in June at Texas with a third-place effort.

John Hunter has finished 10th or better in four of his six starts this season, including sixth-place runs at Dover, Eldora and Bristol. He’ll be back behind the wheel this weekend when the Truck Series travels to Canadian Tire Motorsports Park for Sunday’s Chevrolet Silverado 250 (Fox Sports 1, 1:30 p.m. ET).

"We have the potential; we’re getting closer and closer each time," Joe Nemechek said. "John Hunter’s got such a good feel for what it needs and he’s using his head out on the track.

"When you have to learn that stuff, it’s so much more difficult. … When you have it, you have it and that just makes everything so much easier."

The bigger obstacle, Nemechek said, is "giving him better equipment.

"Believe me, we’re spending money, we’re doing the things we need to do to do that. But the guys we’re racing against – look at the guys that finished in front of us, they’re all champions.

"So how do you break into that? You just have to be smarter and work harder and just keep getting at it. We’re getting better."

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