TALLADEGA, Ala. – Kyle Busch is seeking to join a select group of drivers who have won four straight Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series races at the end of Sunday’s Geico 500.
That group includes Hall of Famers Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, Dale Earnhardt, Bill Elliott, Mark Martin, David Pearson, Darrell Waltrip and Cale Yarborough, as well as Harry Gant, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Billy Wade.
Johnson was the last to do so, when he won four-straight en route to the 2007 championship, and Busch hopes to become the first driver to accomplish the feat this decade.
However, Busch’s attempt to become the 13th member of the four-in-a-row fraternity comes at the most unpredictable track in NASCAR, the 2.66-mile Talladega Superspeedway, where restrictor plates create pack racing and the draft often leads to mass chaos and surprise victors.
Busch hopes to shake off that trend and continue a recent surge of dominance in NASCAR’s top division unlike any in recent years, save for a similar hat trick run by rival Kevin Harvick earlier this spring.
The 2015 Cup champion has won back-to-back-to-back races at Texas Motor Speedway, Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway and Richmond (Va.) Raceway entering this weekend, the second time in Busch’s premier series career that he has won three races in succession.
Last time, Busch nearly completed the four-peat, running out of fuel on the final lap at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway in August of 2015 after having won at Kentucky Speedway, New Hampshire Motor Speedway and Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the three weeks prior.
This time, he hopes to complete the accomplishment, though he knows it won’t be easy.
“We may have won the last three races, but at this track and on this weekend, that doesn’t matter at all,” admitted Busch. “It’s such a crapshoot here (at Talladega) in the last 20, 30 or 40 laps that you never really know who is going to win, what’s going to happen or where the wreck is going to come from.
“This race is never really in the driver’s hands. It’s kind of always in fate’s hands. We’ll just take what we can get this weekend at Talladega and see where it gets us. If that’s a win, fantastic, but the key is surviving until the end. If we do that, then we should have a chance. … Also, the guys that have been on streaks of three in a row or four in a row, they’ve never gone through a plate race, at least to the best of my knowledge. It makes for a more challenging time to be able to get that fourth in a row, but also we’ll know how much more rewarding it is when we do get it.”
Busch said that he’s never had a stretch in his career where he’s felt as much momentum as he has the past two months, with seven-straight top-three finishes dating back to the beginning of March.
“The last three weeks have been really special. Short tracks, I feel, are some of my better-suited race tracks and one of my personal specialties,” noted Busch. “At least, I like to think that they are, anyways. I love racing anywhere, but the short tracks kind of seem to fit in my wheelhouse. I love running my super late model teams, as well. They give me a chance to run some more short tracks throughout the year… and maybe that gives me a little bit of an upper edge for how cars need to be at slower speeds.
“It’s been a great year thus far. We had a rough start at Daytona. From there on out, we’ve been really strong. We’ve just got to keep it rolling.”
To do that, Busch knows that avoiding the dreaded Big One – something he wasn’t able to do in the Daytona 500 – will be key if he wants to win his 47th career Cup Series race on Sunday and take sole possession of 15th on the all-time victories list.
“You have to stay out of trouble, as hard as that is,” Busch said. “You stay where the pack is generally, and once the field gets up single file on the wall until it’s time to go, you can pretty much run wide open every single lap. Everyone can run up on top of each other. When you get single file at the bottom, sometimes it’s hard to get a lane on the outside with enough good cars to get something going.
“Racing Talladega can be frustrating at times because of that, but it also still puts on a good race each time we go there. If you can be a contender and stay in line on the bottom, you can make it a pretty easy and safe race. Normally, guys are not content doing that, so that’s when it starts to get crazy. We just hope we can come out on the good side of crazy at the end of 500 miles on Sunday.”
