Kyle Busch did all he could but did not have enough to rundown Kevin Harvick and was forced to finish second in the TicketGuardian 500 at ISM Raceway.
Busch was in the mix in the final stages of Sunday’s race and in a torrid battle with Denny Hamlin and Harvick for position. But green flag stops forced everyone to pit road and a slight bobble cost Busch a little time he was not able to make up on track.
“Slowly but surely kind of worked my way in there, closed the gap to those guys,” Busch explained. “Once I got in there, I tried to pounce as quick as I could to get through there, which helped and got us the lead.
“Coming into the green flag stops, had a couple guys pit a little bit before us. I don’t think that hurt us too bad, but the jack dropping certainly did. We lost the race on pit road today. There’s been races where I’ve won it on pit road, too. We’ll just have to go into next week and see what we can do there.”
Harvick’s win was his third straight and continued the hot start to the year by Ford and particularly Stewart-Haas Racing. While Busch and his Toyota/Joe Gibbs Racing team were strong Sunday, he admits there’s ground to be made up.
“All in all, I think the guys at Stewart-Haas have done a fantastic job late last year of finding some speed, even though they felt like they were behind,” Busch said. “They didn’t, but somebody else did. But they went to work and did a really good job and were fast. The 4 car made it to the final race. He was fast in the final race.
“They’ve just kind of picked up where they left off. With some of the rule changes that happened over the off season, we felt like that slowed our stuff down a little bit. Didn’t slow theirs down near as much. Playing a little bit of a catch up game to see where we needed improvements to get our stuff going better. It’s pretty good to know we’re a little bit off now but we’re finishing second each week.”
But Busch has by no means given up and believes as the season wears on his time will come.
“It’s a long year,” he said. “You go week by week. You got to be ready for Daytona, that’s where the season starts. The real season, everybody says, starts at Atlanta. I wouldn’t say our season started today. We ran second last week, so…
“We’ve been doing what we do. That’s just to go to the racetrack each week and focus on how we can make ourselves better. Yesterday we were not, absolutely we were not a second place car, but our guys went to work and did a fantastic job of getting us there. We actually had a shot for the win today. We go into next week focused on the same thing, try to do the same thing, and run a good, smooth, clean race out there and try to win.”
