NASCAR Sprint Cup Series: Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at The Glen

Topics:  Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at The Glen

Kyle Busch
August 15, 2011

WATKINS GLEN, NEW YORK

THE MODERATOR: Brad, thank you very much for your time this afternoon.
At this time we welcome Kyle Busch, driver of the No. 18 M&M's Toyota, who finished third in today's 26th annual Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dip. Talk about those last few laps.
KYLE BUSCH: Well, you're just preparing for the restart and trying to make sure you get your tires warmed up, your brakes warmed up. But there's only one corner you've got to make, and as soon as you make it through that corner and can keep everything behind you it'll be smooth sailing from there, and didn't do it. Screwed up first chance I got. Just got down into Turn 1, didn't stop the way I needed to, and the wheel didn't turn the way I expected it to and over-slid the corner, got too far out to the outside and by then everybody was just on my inside.
So screwed up, and gave one away. Gave another one away. And can't say enough about the guys, though. They've done a phenomenal job for me and gave me a great race car today. It was fun to run up front like that, and the last eight, ten laps there where Marcos got by and was catching us, and it seemed like any time I made a mistake, he'd really gain on me a lot, and any time he might make a mistake or slip a little bit I could kind of squeeze away from him. Last couple laps getting away from him; last thing I wanted to see was a caution. I just hate it for everybody and all my guys.

Q. Was there any contact coming out of 1, though? Did anybody get into you or did you just lose it on your own?
KYLE BUSCH: I got that far out on my own, first of all, but then when I came back, certainly those guys didn't care to give me any room. I bounced off I don't know if it was the -- I think it was the 9 and had to still run through the dirt a little bit. And fortunately stayed on the outside of the 42 through Turn 2 and he had to give way through Turn 3 and I was able to keep third.

Q. You were one of the teams using a two-pit strategy. Talk about the strategy and the day you were having with it, and towards the end how worried were you about your gas?
KYLE BUSCH: You know, we tried working through practice and everything, seeing if we could do a two-stop strategy. The more we tried to save fuel, the slower I went. We weren't too sure that it was going to work for us.
But we made some changes to the car to try to make sure that we could stay on that two-stop strategy knowing that that would help us win the race. Essentially it didn't. I guess the guy that won was on a three-stop strategy. But gave us the track position all day; we didn't have to fight anybody too hard, and seemed like our car was out in clean air much of the day.
Whether the three-stop strategy would have been any different, I'm not sure, but guys did a great job making sure we could do it on two, and I had to do what I could under yellows to try to save a little bit of fuel. We weren't too worried there at the end. We ended up getting better fuel mileage than we expected to just because when I got out and had an eight-second lead or whatever, I could kind of run my own pace and shift early and stuff like that to try to save a little bit more.

Q. Going down let's say the last 15 laps and it was you and Marcos, were you holding back playing any possum or were you kind of driving it full out?
KYLE BUSCH: No, that was full bore. That was all there was. Any time you try to get a little bit more out of it and you try and squeeze just that much harder, you slip, and any time you slip, you give up a lot of time. So that's where Marcos was getting me, so I just kind of concentrated then on hitting my marks and making sure I was consistent and maybe under-driving the car just a little bit. Instead of going 100 or 101 percent just maybe give it 97 and make sure that you stay under it and run consistent times. And when I started doing that he didn't catch me anymore; I actually started getting back away from him the last two laps before that caution. It seemed to be working a little bit.