BROOKLYN, Mich. –– Kyle Busch has returned to form.
For the first time in what seemed like ages, Busch found himself as a regular contender at the front of the NASCAR Cup Series field at Michigan International Speedway.
With qualifying rained out on Saturday (Aug. 17), the metric NASCAR used placed Busch as the 13th-place starter. He was able to work his way up to a sixth-place finish in stage one on Sunday (Aug. 18) before the skies opened up again and forced NASCAR to hold the final 149 laps on Monday (Aug. 19).
“You gotta be on top of your game,” Busch said of the wait. “You gotta be ready to go at any moment’s notice if they call you to go. … Being around for so long, you know, it doesn’t really deter me much.
“It gets you hopeful that it deters somebody else and you can excel on that.”
When the race went back green on Monday, Busch was one of the fastest drivers out of the gate. He took the lead from Chase Elliott and was able to hold onto it for several laps before Martin Truex Jr. surged to the front. All in all, Busch led three times for 24 laps, just the third-highest number of laps he’s led in a race this season.
Busch was even able to come away with the stage two win after wrestling it away from Ross Chastain on a restart. The stage ended under caution after a big crash with just under five laps to go left no time to restart before the stage’s conclusion.
Sensing that the No. 8 could potentially sneak away from the Irish Hills with a win or top five, Busch’s crew chief Randall Burnett dialed up some savvy pit strategy under the final green flag pit stop. When Busch came to pit road on lap 167, Burnett gave Busch just two fresh tires instead of four, to allow him to maintain track position and leapfrog the leaders.
“We knew we had to get outside our box,” Burnett told Frontstretch after the race. “We weren’t gonna be able to outrun a couple of those cars straight up, because a couple of them had a little bit better speed than us. So we had to figure out a way to try to put ourselves in position to be in front of them.
“We had fresher lefts and we didn’t need as much fuel. So we only needed two tires at that point. So that was to jump in front of [the leaders] and make them pass us instead of us trying to figure out how to pass them.”
The call worked as good as it was able to, as Busch was able to exit pit road and blend back on to the racetrack well ahead of
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