August 20, 2009
By Doug Demmons
Has the driver with more raw talent than most of the field -- at both driving and trash talking -- finally been humbled?
After a mediocre Michigan performance, Busch is looking up in the standings at 14 other drivers. If he wants to make the Chase he is going to have to leapfrog two guys ahead of him -- Brian Vickers and Clint Bowyer -- who are also trying to claw their way into the playoffs.
This has to be especially unnerving for a driver with three wins on the season. But that’s what happens when your three wins are scattered among a slew of finishes in the 20s and 30s.
Last year the No. 18 team didn’t fold up until the Chase started. This year the slide started a lot earlier.
At the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Busch was sitting in sixth place. But in the 11 races since then he has just two top 10s and his average finish is 19.5.
The No. 18 team is suddenly looking very average and very confused.
“I don't know what happened at the end,” crew chief Steve Addington said after Michigan’s 23rd-place finish. “We got our track position and then lost a good bunch of that on the restart. We put two tires on it and topped it off with all (the fuel) we could and thought we were in good shape to go to the end. The car just got tight on us. I can't explain it. I'm trying to find out right now."
Busch realizes he’s in a deep hole that he has largely dug by himself. And at Indianapolis he seemed to finally realize -- after conversations with a representative of his sponsor among others -- that the first thing to do when you are in a big hole is to stop digging.
So Busch said he was going to try to do better. He said he needed to lead his team rather than throw it under the bus.
Can he turn it around? Yes.
The three tracks left before the Chase -- Bristol, Atlanta and Richmond -- are three of Busch’s best. He won at Bristol in March and was second in the night race last year. And his last win this season came at Richmond.
Is there enough time? Probably not.
Busch is 70 points behind Mark Martin in 12th place, 90 points behind Matt Kenseth in 11th and 100 back of Greg Biffle in 10th. Between him and 12th place are Vickers and Bowyer.
In addition to top 5 finishes Busch needs to outperform Vickers and Bowyer and needs a bucketload of bad luck to be dumped on either Kenseth, Martin or Biffle.
If anyone breaks into the Chase it is much more likely to be Bowyer. Vickers has yet to earn a top 10 at Bristol, whereas Bowyer has four top 10s in his last five Bristol races.
So Busch will likely be on the outside this year. And maybe that will be a good thing. Failure can be a great teacher.
Maybe he’ll learn that second place is not a catastrophe. Maybe he’ll figure out that it’s better to be a star than a shooting star. A meteor lights up the night sky but burns out quickly. Meteors get lots of press clippings and TV time. Stars get championship trophies.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
Follow Doug on Twitter: @dougdemmons
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.