New #18 crew chief talks about jump to Sprint Cup

While new #18 crew chief Adam Stevens will be making his Sprint Cup debut in 2015, he's a very familiar face to the driver he'll be working with: Kyle Busch. Stevens has collected 31 wins as a crew chief for JGR's NASCAR XFINITY Series program over the last four years. 19 of them have come over the last two seasons alone from working with Busch; after racking up a staggering 12 wins together in 2013, the duo followed up with seven more this past year.

In an interview today on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, Stevens touched on how he and Busch quickly became a successful pair. "Kyle and I, we have a little bit of history now of building some communication and some success behind us," he said.

"The cool thing about him and I is we look at race cars the same way, and immediately when we started working together, his feedback and what I'm thinking and how I think race cars work just seemed to mesh really well. And in our brief history [together], it's added up to quite a few wins. We're hoping to see if we can carry some of that into the Cup Series. There are certain aspects of the race that will make it a little bit more easier, comparatively. But the [Cup] races as a whole – being so much longer, the track conditions, and the preferred line and handling conditions you're fighting – tend to change a lot more through the race. You're trading one set of problems – managing your tire sets – for another set of problems, which is managing changing track conditions." NBC Sports