Kyle Busch – what would Dale Earnhardt do?
On tangling with driver Brad Keselowski on track:
“… that’s part of racing … short-track racing at Bristol. I worked on the guy for 12 or 15 laps to try to pass him, passed him clean, moved up in front of him in order to block his run or do a slide job, whatever you want to call it, cause my spotter said I was clear. He hits me in the back end, puts me in the wall and I thought to myself, ‘What would Dale Sr. do? What would Tony Stewart do? And who is the guy who just did it to me?’ So, those three questions were answered getting into Turn 3 and I had my mind made up and did what I did in order to try to win the thing."
With two races left until the Chase, is the 18 team where you want to be right now?
“It’s close. The team, you can’t ask for guys who pull for you any harder, who work for you any harder … that do the things that they do, and of course, their families, the sacrifices that they make. As far as results go, I think that we are just a little bit off. We’ve got a little bit that we can work on to get a little bit better. We’ve run pretty well in these last few weeks, I just didn’t get the finishes I wanted. In Michigan we were running fourth, fifth much of the day and I fenced it with 30 laps to go and we fell back and finished 18th or something, so it’s been frustrating on that end of things, but our cars have been good. JGR is getting better week in and week out, the motors are getting stronger, our bodies are getting better.
“It just takes having everything right and having everything go together for the final 10 races in order to win this thing. We know how difficult it is – OK, people say Jimmie Johnson makes it look easy — it’s not easy people, trust me. The guy to beat right now is Kevin Harvick. He’s got it … it’s his championship to lose. You saw in 2008 (me) being in his same shoes and lost it. Hopefully, this year we can bounce back and take it in the final 10."