Kyle Busch’s string of bad luck in the spring race at Dover International Speedway continued in Sunday’s AAA 400 Drive for Autism.
Busch was forced to the garage on Lap 271 with a drivetrain issue, relegating him to a 35th-place finish and his first DNF of the season and fourth in the last five spring races at Dover.
“At first, I thought that it was an engine problem, but that wasn’t the case,” Busch said. “It was certainly in the drivetrain – something else. You know, this isn’t very popular of a failure for us, so we have an idea – I already know what was wrong – but we’ve got to go back to the shop and kind of diagnose and figure out why it was wrong and kind of go from there.”
Busch felt the issue early, but was running in the top five for a majority of the race until it finally let go. He earned 17 stage points in the first two stages.
“The Pedigree Camry was good – it was top-three car,” Busch said. “I felt like barring some different clean air circumstances, you know, and different restart lines and stuff, I felt like I could get up there and race with the 4 (Kevin Harvick) or the 2 (Brad Keselowski), but as bad as that vibration kept getting throughout the race there it was just too hard to handle and finally it threw the shifter knob off the shifter and there was – even when it broke, I could just push the clutch in. I couldn’t even grab the shifter in order to get it knocked out of gear or anything like that. It was so hard – still vibrating so badly. We’ll go on to next week.”
Prior to today, Busch posted nine straight finishes of 13th or better, which included seven top fives with three wins. He now leads Joey Logano in the standings by 22 points after Dover.
