Between off-season testing, the Christmas holiday and tending to matters at his Camping World Truck Series team, Kyle Busch hasn’t had much time to relax this winter.
And with Preseason Thunder testing beginning today at Daytona International Speedway, he couldn’t help but be a little irked at the timing.
“All in all, I feel like this Daytona test from what I remember – I used to remember it being the end of January, and for some reason it’s the beginning of January [now],” he said during a rain delay at DIS.
“It takes away time from people being able to get stuff repaired, and I just think we’re here too soon in my opinion. But it is what it is. They put a date out there and say you’ve got to be here. We’re here.”
While he may not have been able to disconnect much from the racing side of things in the off-season, he says he nonetheless finds himself “the freshest” when it’s time to embark on a new year.
“I like the beginning of the year,” the Joe Gibbs Racing driver said. “I think Daytona is Daytona – Daytona, if you can win it, great. It really doesn’t mean a whole lot. I think the first five races don’t really mean a whole lot.
“It’s more about learning your team, getting a chemistry going, whether you have a new car or just the new chemistry within your team, and just being able to build, put your building blocks together in the first five weeks, and then it’s on from weeks 6 to 26 essentially, so you’ve got 20 weeks to prove yourself and make it in the Chase.”
Busch comes off a fourth-place finish in last year’s Cup championship with four victories, and he put together a solid Chase with five Top-5s and seven Top-10s. But it wasn’t a perfect one, as his title hopes were effectively finished by a crash in the fourth Chase race at Kansas.
Like everyone else in the NASCAR garage, Busch has taken note of CEO Brian France’s continued hints of format changes that may include an altered points system that puts more incentive on wins.
However, he believes that NASCAR should look to changes that will enable drivers to make poor performances such as his ill-fated day at Kansas last October hurt less.
“In a way, you look at the points structure and you try to say, well, you need to reward winning more,” he explained. “Okay, go down the list of the last five, six, seven years – who’s won the most races? It’s Jimmie Johnson. So you’re going to award a guy who wins all the races more points, and he already has the consistency?
“I think what you’re looking at is you’re trying to take away the bad days. So if you have a bad day, if you finished in the 30s or the 40s or something to that effect and you can go back the next week and you can win, essentially you’re knocking back those bad finishes…”
Busch also touched on his 2014 plans for Kyle Busch Motorsports in the CWTS, confirming that he and Erik Jones will share the No. 51 Toyota and that Darrell Wallace Jr. will drive the No. 54 Toyota. He also said he would be testing for KBM in the Trucks’ Preseason Thunder sessions at Daytona on Monday and Tuesday.
