Kyle Busch thinks his odds of advancing to the Championship 4 season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway are very high.
Busch enters Sunday’s AAA Texas 500 at Texas Motor Speedway 46 points ahead of the cutoff on the playoff grid. Joey Logano secured one of the four berths in Miami with his Martinsville win a week ago and Busch is in the best spot points-wise of the drivers still hoping to have the chance to run for the title.
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver believes he’ll be one of those participants.
“I’d like to think our odds are pretty good,” Busch said. “Obviously anything can happen. We won Martinsville last year and came here and had two flat tires in the race and we didn’t fair very well. You still have to have some luck on your side and have everything kind of go your way. It’s tough to rebound sometimes after a difficult start to a day or even if you have trouble later in the day it’s really difficult to rebound and get a good finish like you need.
“We’d love to be able to win and automatically lock ourselves through, but if that’s not the case then you just have to be smart and mindful of a good points day and try not to hurt yourself and minimize mistakes if some are made.”
While this week’s race at Texas is not on a short track like Martinsville’s .526-mile layout a week ago, Busch still believes aggressive driving might be part of the equation in Sunday’s second race of the Round of 8.
“I think there’s opportunity to be aggressive here if you want to be aggressive, but there’s a lot of risk for reward at this place, especially on restarts with as slick as we’ve seen it be, as narrow as we’ve seen it be the last few years since the repave,” Busch explained.
“Depending on how the rubber application gets going here this weekend and how wide of a groove you kind of see between the Truck race and the Xfinity race leading into the Cup race, that kind of determines what all you should expect or how hard you feel like you can go on restarts.”
Busch has been in the Championship 4 the last three years and feels very confident about a return trip this season. However while optimistic, he’s not taking anything for granted and knows it will be a battle.
“This year, the JGR cars are good again, but the SHR cars are probably a tick faster,” he said. “It’s going to be a dogfight down to the end on whose able to bring it home and who’s able to get it at Homestead. It’s going to be an interesting battle for sure, but I’d like to think we can fight them out all the way to the end, even though they have the upper hand.”
