Despite victory, Kyle Busch still faces a bumpy road to the Chase

By foxsports
Published

One of the reasons NASCAR adopted the "win-and-you're-in" Chase format is to make it easy for fans to understand. If a driver wins any of the 26 races in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular season, he -- or she -- is all but guaranteed a slot to race for the series championship over the final 10 races of the year.

Easy, right?

For better or worse, when it comes to the Busch brothers in 2015, nothing is easy to understand.

Three days before the Daytona 500, both of them were entered in NASCAR's biggest race.

Two days before the Daytona 500, Kurt Busch was knocked out because of a NASCAR suspension.

One day before the Daytona 500, Kyle Busch was knocked out by injuries in a crash.

Kurt missed three races, but came back and won at Richmond and Michigan, has made his way into the top 10 in points and is locked into the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. In fact, the elder Busch is one of the favorites to win it all this year.

And with his stirring victory in Sunday's Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway, Kyle Busch is suddenly in Chase contention. Unfortunately, here's where math gets involved -- despite what you may have been told about there would be no math. And it gets kind of complicated. 

To make the Chase, a driver has to do two things: 1. Win one of the 26 Sprint Cup regular season races, which Kyle now has obviously done; and 2. Finish the regular season in the top 30 in points. Because he missed 11 races with injuries, Kyle is only 37th in points, even after his Sonoma triumph.

Right now, Cole Whitt is 30th in points, 136 ahead of the younger Busch. Essentially, that means that over the next 10 races, Busch has to finish, on average, 14 positions per race ahead of Whitt.

What are odds of success? Probably no more than 50-50.

In the final 10 races of last year's regular season, Busch scored 212 points. If he repeats that number, he'll end this year's regular season with 337 points. Whitt, meanwhile, is averaging 16.3 points per race, which over 26 races projects to 424 points.

Let's look at it another way: In the five races Busch has competed in since returning from his Daytona crash, he's averaged 25 points per race. If he keeps that average up over the next 10 races, he'll accumulate another 250 points to go with the 125 he has now. That's a total of 375, which again is well short of where the 30th-place driver is expected to finish.

Then again, as Busch rightly noted after his Sonoma victory, he can race differently now that he has a win in the books. He no longer needs to drive at 110 percent and risk crashing to win; instead in can concentrate on amassing points.

"Now having a win, you know, obviously I think that that treats us a little bit better," Busch said when asked about his odds of making the Chase. "We don't have to race as hard for a win. We don't have to put ourselves in a bad spot when we're running third, fourth or fifth to try to get that victory. We can run third, fourth or fifth and that's a good day for us; that'll be just fine. We just need to be able to do that, and I feel like (crew chief) Adam Stevens builds good enough race cars for me that I can do that with. Joe Gibbs Racing does, TRD builds good engines for us, so I've got no worries on that front."

Maybe he'll get in, maybe he won't, but Kyle's prospects now look a good bit brighter than they did on Saturday, and that's a good thing for the sport.

The bottom line on the Busch brothers right now?

Kurt is one of the top five favorites to win the championship.

Kyle's quest to make the Chase is one of the top five storylines in the sport right now.

And there's no question that the balance of the Sprint Cup regular season suddenly got a whole lot more interesting thanks to what happened at Sonoma on Sunday.