Busch Vrooms Vegas: Wins on His Home Track

Kyle Busch won at his hometown track and gave Joe Gibbs Racing their first win, as well as his, at Las Vegas Motorspeedway.

Officially it will be noted that Busch won from the pole postion, but due to a severe engine failure during practice on Saturday that led to an engine change which put Busch to the tail end of the field.

He wasn’t the only one to change his engine either, almost every other Toyota in the field had to change their motors and start at the end of the field too. Only Busch’s JGR team-mates didn’t change their motors because they make their own motors and don’t get them already made from Toyota. Busch’s engine problems were not related to those of his fellow Toyota drivers so Gibbs wasn’t worried abou Hamlin’s and Logano’s engines.

Speaking of engines, can you beleve Kenseth’s luck? His team-mate David Ragan also suffered an engine related problem too and Hendrick’s engine woes continued this week with Mark Martin. No word yet if Kenseth’s and Ragan’s engine problems are related to each other, as well as if Martin’s engine problems were related to their problems from last week.

One thing that I liked about the race today really had nothing to do with the race itself but with the track. Did you see the new safer barriers on the inside retaining walls where Jeff Gordon crashed really hard last year? I did and I was very happy to see that the track put those barriers up. All of the tracks need to put safer barriers up on all of their walls, both inside and outside walls and on the straightaways.

Another thing that I noticed is that Goodyear put together a decent tire for this track, well Jeff Gordon might disagree but if he wouldn’t have missed the entrance to pit road and flat spotted his tire it wouldn’t have blown. Also, it was that blown tire that enabled him to stay on the lead lap, so he really can’t complain.

It was interesting to see what transpired after Gordon blew that tire putting a lot of cars a lap down because they had their green flag stops before the caution came out. One such person was Jimmie Johnson, who also didn’t help his cause by slidding through his pit stall.

Those who benefitted were pretty much anyone who finished in the top 10 including Bobby Labonte, David Reutimann, Clint Bowyer, and Jeff Burton.

With that being said, I’ve got to go now so look for more of my post-race observations tomorrow.