Kurt Busch seizes Auto Club four hundred opportunities
Motorsports
Kurt Busch seizes Auto Club four hundred opportunities
By Louis Brewster, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Posted: 03/21/17, 12:04 PM PDT | Updated: on 03/21/2017
Kurt Busch has a special reason to love NASCAR Cup races at Auto Club Speedway: his sponsors.
The Las Vegas native drives the No. Forty one Haas Automation/Monster Energy Ford for Stewart-Haas Racing. Haas Automation is headquartered in Oxnard and Busch has traveled up the coast in the past before Sunday’s race to visit with Haas employees.
Furthermore, headquarters for Monster Energy, the series sponsor, is a quick drive down Interstate fifteen from the Fontana track. Many of the Two,000 employees will be in attendance at the 20th anniversary of the Auto Club 400, a race Busch won fourteen years ago.
And if that wasn’t enough, Busch will be at March Reserve Air Force Base in Riverside on Thursday to visit a friend.
In addition to his two thousand three victory, Busch has four poles, seven top-5 finishes and a dozen top-10 finishes in twenty three starts at the two-mile superspeedway. However, in his past five starts at Fontana, he’s posted a pair of top-5 efforts and two other top-10s.
“It’s a lot of joy to race at ACS with both Haas Automation and Monster Energy headquartered nearby,” Busch said. “It’s a busy week. Then you want to go to the race track and have a good run because everybody’s there, and they’re that close to the act one time a year. So, of course you want to do well.
“There’s some added pressure. We want to come away with the win. We almost got it a duo of years ago but, last year, we missed the setup. You’re going to be hot, you’re going to be cold — we hope it’s a race we’re going to be hot for.”
With his practice at the Fontana track, Busch is sold on the key to success at the track.
“I think the key to success is short-run speed,” Busch said. “It always seems to come down to a green-white-checkered finish or a quick pit stop at the end to put four tires on. You’ll be five-, six-wide going down into turn one and off of two, you’ve got to find the right slots at the end of the race even tho’ you’ve been out there for four hundred miles.”
Size matters
Monster Cup Series drivers are still zizzing about the post-race fisticuffs earlier this month inbetween Kyle Busch and Joey Logano at the Kobalt four hundred at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
One driver who doesn’t seem himself in that predicament bondage is Kyle Larson.
Mostly because he is listed, generously, at 5-foot-6 and one hundred thirty pounds.
“Look at how big I am,” Larson said with a chuckle in Phoenix before the Cup race. “I can’t do that. Joey has got most likely about two feet longer reach on me, too. No, but, I’m not the fighting type. I don’t think I’ve ever been mad enough that I have ever dreamed to punch somebody, mainly very likely because I’m funked that I am the one that is going to get hammer up.
“No, I don’t know. Maybe I’m petite enough, too. . I’m a lot smaller than most of the other drivers that maybe they will see the disadvantage while they are walking over to my car and won’t punch me. But that was pretty arousing (in Las Vegas).”
Pit stops
• Scott Eastwood, who will starlet in the upcoming “Rapid and Furious: The Fate of the Furious,” will serve as grand marshal for the Auto Club 400. In that role, Eastwood will give the guideline, “Drivers, commence your engines!” before the commence of the event.
• It was been reported on two fronts — Phoenix freelance writer Michael Knight and NBC Sports — that the July twenty two Xfinity Series event at Indianapolis Motor Speedway will feature restrictor plates. If all goes well, NASCAR would be used in two thousand eighteen not only at IMS, but also Pocono Raceway and Michigan International Speedway.