18 Days ‘til the Brickyard 400: Kyle Busch wants to win “a big one”

Kyle Busch dominated at Kentucky. He’s still waiting, though, to capture a crown jewel of the sport—a win at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the Brickyard 400.

“I’d love nothing more than to win there,” said Busch. “It would be something cool. Been close a couple times, but like to get a little closer.”

Considering the next time Kyle Busch wins it will be his 100th NASCAR win, I think winning at Indy would be a big deal. But he’d rather win sooner.

“[The] Brickyard is still a little ways off,” he told me. “Maybe we can talk about 104 or something by then.”

With just 18 days until the Brickyard 400, the countdown is on. Every year around this time I say the same thing: Kyle Busch is good enough to win at Indy. And every year, without fail, I always come back home from Speedway, Indiana with the same question: He’s won everywhere else, and he’s a great driver, why can’t he win at Indy?

“It’s so hard to find a particular line that really, really works for your car because the groove is so narrow,” Busch explained. “It’s plenty wide for one or one-and-a-half cars, but the line that you run around there, if you vary six inches it feels so different.

“You really have to be particular in hitting your marks and getting your car set up. The way that it changes throughout the weekend going from practice, not much rubber on the racetrack, and then to the race with a lot of rubber on the racetrack, the trajectory of the corners changes.

“How wide do you enter the corner? How long do you stay out? How sharp do you turn down?”

But would it be awesome to win his 100th NASCAR event at the Brickyard?

“I'm hoping it comes at Loudon, sorry,” he said to me. “Certainly whenever the next one is, I'll be cherishing it just as much as I did the last one. To me, I don't want to wait that long for win 100. Hopefully we get the opportunity to run up front again and, you know, have a chance to win some other races before we get to the Brickyard.”

In six races at the world famous speedway, Busch has only one top five (a fourth in 2007) and four top ten finishes. His only non-top ten finishes came in back-to-back years, 2008 and 2009.

Busch at Kentucky

Everyone remembers the tire debacle of 2008, and in 2009 Busch wrecked in turn four about 60 laps into the event.

If Busch can get his No. 18 into the shape that he had in it at Kentucky this past weekend, the field at Indy will be in trouble.

Even though he’s never pulled off a win at Indianapolis, he certainly looks like a contender again this year.