Is Kyle Busch a title contender? He aims to find out in Las Vegas

By Bob Pockrass
FOX Sports NASCAR Writer  

Kyle Busch slogged through the first round of the 2021 playoff in forgetful fashion, with one big crash, other damaging contact, a speeding penalty, a NASCAR fine and still enough points to advance and continue to compete for the Cup Series championship.

Busch will try to put the opening round behind him as he goes from the driver who ranked 15th among playoff drivers in points earned in the first round to entering the second round fifth in the Cup standings, nine points above the cutoff.

So does Busch feel like his Joe Gibbs Racing team is that team that sits fifth in the standings entering the second round of Las Vegas, Talladega and the Charlotte road course – or the team that stumbled through the opening round?

Busch heads to his hometown this weekend thinking he can run among the top-five in points. But ...

"In this round right here, it doesn’t matter how good you can be, ... we just have to live up to what we feel like is a realistic potential and if outside circumstances take us outside of that, then obviously it wasn’t meant to be," Busch said.

"It’s fate. There isn’t much you can do getting caught up in other people’s stuff."

Busch didn’t live up to his potential in the opening round, where he struggled at Darlington before crashing, was decent at Richmond before a speeding penalty and then had a flat tire late at Bristol.

Darlington stung for Busch because he felt the team had a good car at the track in May. After a simulation session suggested they change the setup, the team did so, and Busch was livid in the opening laps when he felt the car didn’t handle well.

Busch’s response? He scrapped his simulator time for Las Vegas.

"I threw that out the window after Darlington, and we’re just going to go off of our notes from earlier this year how we ran out there," Busch said. "We actually did simulate for Vegas [in March] and when we showed up, we were way off, and we had to work on the car all race long.

"Finally, the third stage we were pretty decent, we were able to drive our way back up to the front and finish third."

The team knows the setup from that third-place finish and will use that as its basis for the race Sunday.

"We’re just going to go off of our notes and go off what we think we need to do and look at our mile-and-a-half program as a whole this year and what we’ve learned and what we’ve done," Busch said.

Many teams and drivers relish time in the simulator, on which manufacturers spend significant dollars and time gathering data on the tracks to get it as close as possible to the conditions for the race. Busch said drivers sometimes work with different tire info and "it’s very, very convoluted and challenging to figure it all out."

"It’s all about the tire model and whatever tire model you put in the sim is kind of the characteristics of what your vehicle will drive like – and every driver has their own interpretation as to what they feel like they’re feeling and the exact feel that they get from the butt to the chassis," Busch said.

If Busch can just avoid drama in this round, he should be OK. But for Busch, that sometimes is easier said than done. That first round included a $50,000 fine for driving into the Darlington garage at a speed that NASCAR felt was unsafe.

Busch said he didn’t have any discussions with NASCAR about the fine.

"It is what it is," he said. "We move on."

For Busch, he is used to handling a little bit of turmoil. He also is used to these types of knockout playoff rounds, having conquered two of them in winning championships in 2015 and 2019.

His crew chief for those titles was Adam Stevens, and now that Ben Beshore is Busch’s crew chief, Busch has talked with Beshore about things that he and Stevens did in the playoffs that made them successful.

Beshore has added a couple of engineers to meetings that typically would be limited to Busch and the crew chief so they can hear Busch’s blunt assessments of the team.

"We’re not where we need to be, and I keep saying that," Busch said. "We’re not the Kyle Busch of old where we’re leading tons of laps like [Kyle] Larson and running out front and battling for leads and stage wins and all that stuff.

"[I’m] trying to get that message across n a nice manner that we still have some work to do."

The other message is that they could just be subject to fate, and they need to do everything they can to optimize points this weekend at Las Vegas before the unpredictable Talladega and Charlotte "roval" road course.

"You just go out there and do the best you can do and last year we saw it eliminate us after making some questionable calls on what we’re doing strategy-wise," Busch said. "It’s just kind of the unfortunate of those two races being in the round together."

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Playoff meter

What to watch for

Larson won at Las Vegas in the spring, leading 103 of the 267 laps on the way to the victory. In that race, Penske put two drivers in the top five, with Brad Keselowski second and Ryan Blaney fifth. Joe Gibbs Racing put four in the top seven, with Kyle Busch third, Denny Hamlin fourth, Martin Truex Jr. sixth and Christopher Bell seventh.

Expect more of the same this time, although the Penske drivers might not be able to have as much success.

The day before the Cup race, the Xfinity Series opens its playoffs. AJ Allmendinger (four wins and the regular-season championship) and Austin Cindric (five wins and the defending series champion) are the two favorites.

One big difference: Cindric has been through the rigors of the playoffs; Allmendinger has made the playoffs once in his NASCAR national series career and was knocked out in the first round. Allmendinger’s last chance at a title came in 2006 in Champ Car.

Allmendinger: "I can’t take anything from that championship run. All I can look at it is I’ve got nothing to lose. It’s late in my career. I didn’t expect this. As we saw coming to the checkered at Bristol, I’m willing to do whatever it takes."

Cindric: "He’s a professional. He’s done this his entire life, a lot longer than I’ve been driving race cars. ... If we get into the final four, I have been in that final four, I know what mentality I need to take to do that, but the hardest part of this playoffs is getting there."

Championship 4 prediction: Cindric, Allmendinger, Justin Allgaier, Daniel Hemric.

For the record, two of my truck picks for the championship 4 already are out (Todd Gilliland and Austin Hill). Who will advance out of the semifinal round that begins at Vegas? My revised prediction: John Hunter Nemechek, Sheldon Creed, Matt Crafton and Zane Smith.

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Thinking out loud

Some wonder if NASCAR should take action against Chase Elliott for messing with the finish at Bristol by holding up Kevin Harvick. It would be a dangerous slope for NASCAR to get involved in when there is no contact in the "retaliation" and a driver just holds another driver’s line.

NASCAR doesn’t need to get involved in blocking calls. It has its hands full when determining whether any retaliation when someone is spun out deserves a penalty.

NASCAR is on the record to employ a "boys have at it" philosophy until it sees the line crossed – a line that it often refers to that it is a line that they know it when they see it.

In this case, Elliott didn’t cross the line.

Next Up: Next Gen

NASCAR will use the Next Gen car for the Clash next February at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Although there is a concern about tearing up some of those cars, that same concern would have been there whether the Clash was on the Daytona oval or the Daytona road course.

Drivers seemed OK with the idea to use the Clash as a shakedown of the new cars despite the potential damage to equipment.

"Nobody wants to spend money on replacing a car, but at the same token, you have to race," said Keselowski, who will be a co-owner and driver at Roush Fenway Racing next year.

"You can’t just sit at home and save our stuff all the time. Yeah, you’re going to do damage to a car, no doubt about it. And we’ll fix it because that’s what we do."

Social spotlight

They said it

"We’re looking for a short-term bump in performance and we’ll see how it goes. ... This was a favor from us to ask Bootie to help us while work on two different avenues at one time." – 23XI Racing co-owner Denny Hamlin on moving Bootie Barker into the crew chief role for Bubba Wallace, allowing competition director Mike Wheeler to focus on the expansion to two cars.

Bob Pockrass has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s. He joined FOX Sports in 2019 following stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @bobpockrass. Looking for more NASCAR content? Sign up for the FOX Sports NASCAR Newsletter with Bob Pockrass!