Kyle Busch has enjoyed success at “The Magic Mile” and is hoping for more this weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
The 1.058-mile track has been a place where Busch has excelled in his NASCAR career. He’ll make his 27th Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series start at NHMS in Sunday’s Foxwoods Resort Casino 301 in search of a fourth career New Hampshire win.
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver, who was four victories in 2018, also has 10 top-five and 14 top-10 finishes on his Loudon resume.
“Loudon is a Martinsville-like short track, but it’s just over a mile,” Busch explained about getting around New Hampshire. “It’s a little more spread out, but there’s some rooting and gouging going on because it’s a one-lane track and everybody fights for that particular groove.
“To be fast at Loudon, you have to have good brakes and you have to roll the center really well and get that good forward bite off the corners and make sure it sticks. The biggest thing about Loudon is, you keep losing front turn-in and that’s why the brakes go away, just because the corners are longer and more sweeping than you need to keep those front tires around you.”
There is a different wrinkle to this year’s July stop at New Hampshire, which marks the 47th race for NASCAR’s top series at the track. A schedule change has taken the track’s annual second fall date off the calendar and shifted the event to Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Now teams won’t use the summer race as a reconnaissance mission to build a notebook for the fall playoff return. There is a school of thought that change may impact the racing this weekend.
“I’m not sure,” Busch said asked about the possibility. “I think that Loudon sometimes is a more challenging racetrack to pass people on, but we’ve had a lot of success there and think we will again this weekend with our Interstate Batteries Toyota. There is more time or opportunity for slipping and sliding and contact being made, being a short track, being a flat track.
“So maybe guys won’t care as much, I guess, because it’s not in the playoffs and they don’t really need notes to help them try and run better there when it comes to playoff time. We’ll see.”
Busch has been locked in a battle with two other drivers in this year’s “Big Three,” Martin Truex Jr. and Kevin Harvick, all year long. Together the trio has combined with win 14 of the season’s 19 races.
But Busch isn’t thinking too much at least in this point of the campaign of focusing on just those two adversaries on a weekly basis.
“I don’t know. You’ve got to make Homestead,” he said. “All three of us have to make Homestead. That’s what it comes down to right now. If we all make Homestead, it comes down to that race, it’s all about just beating them, beating those guys, outracing them.”
