Latest / Kenny Wallace Media / Kyle Busch's Press Conference Did Not Disappoint!

Transcript

Kyle Busch's Press Conference Did Not Disappoint! · Kenny Wallace Media

• 0:00
  So she pulls out a diaper. It was clean, but she pulled out
• 0:03
  a diaper. So I was like, OK, yeah, I could
• 0:05
  sign the baby's forehead. Ricky Bobby does those anything
• 0:10
  to give us more separation before calamity?
• 0:13
  Corner of Turn one would certainly be beneficial with the
• 0:16
  group of crazies that we have. Speaking of pit crews, you've
• 0:20
  got 33 new guys this week and I think a couple of them come from
• 0:25
  the Xfinity Series. Is, is that a concern at all
• 0:28
  that they're dealing with different lug nut situations?
• 0:31
  Have they had time to practice together and anything like that?
• 0:35
  I have no clue. I, I don't have any any idea of
• 0:39
  of where guys are coming from or what their background is or what
• 0:42
  their experience is. But you let into that and gave
• 0:45
  me some of that. So thank you.
• 0:47
  You know, I always kind of just assumed the Cup guys were the
• 0:50
  Xfinity guys. So, news to me, we'll we'll find
• 0:53
  out how good they are come about 1:30 on Sunday.
• 0:57
  Talked with Andy, Petrie said He talked to you this week.
• 0:59
  And I was kind of wondering too, from an athlete's point of view,
• 1:03
  the the challenge of for as good as you are on Pit Rd. trying to
• 1:07
  take it even 10 tenths or take it to another level, How much do
• 1:11
  you have to be careful about not trying to do too much to carry a
• 1:15
  pit crew when there's the concern about you may lose a
• 1:18
  couple seconds. So how do I make it up?
• 1:21
  And then it, I'm guessing maybe was that a factor in sliding
• 1:24
  through or or maybe not? Yeah, I know it was.
• 1:27
  You know, anytime I'm on PIT Rd. and I'm always thinking of the
• 1:29
  sheet and the statistics and the the the pieces of information
• 1:34
  that we have of what we try to gauge ourselves to the rest of
• 1:37
  our competition with. I mean there's probably five or
• 1:39
  six different sectors of pit Rd. of of things that you worry
• 1:43
  about to make sure that you're the best at all of those.
• 1:45
  And, you know, one of those is getting on the pit Rd., how you
• 1:48
  roll your pit Rd. speed with your lights, how you get into
• 1:51
  the box, how you get out-of-the-box, how you exit PIT
• 1:53
  Rd., get back up on the racetrack and blend.
• 1:54
  And so all of those things, you want to be perfect every time.
• 1:57
  And so for me, I had come in the previous two pit stops before
• 2:01
  that, before the one I slid through, where I came in way too
• 2:04
  light. And I'm like, OK, I'm, I'm
• 2:05
  coming in way too light. I'm giving up.
• 2:07
  If it's a half a second, I don't even know what it is, you know?
• 2:09
  And I'm so I'm like, OK, I'm going to make sure I hit it this
• 2:11
  time. And I hit the sign the way I
• 2:13
  need to hit the sign and everything else.
• 2:14
  And so that's what happened. On the next one, I came in as
• 2:17
  hot as I thought I needed to come in.
• 2:19
  And when it locked the rear tires with the brakes, it just
• 2:22
  slid and it slid two inches too far.
• 2:25
  So one week or two too short. The next year too, too long.
• 2:30
  Kind of crazy. But All in all just yeah,
• 2:33
  frustrating day to to have the the disaster that we did on pit
• 2:36
  Rd. of just being really slow and then for me to slide through
• 2:41
  to kind of add insult to injury on my behalf, we otherwise would
• 2:44
  have been you know a top ten finisher.
• 2:47
  So that that was the day that we needed and we certainly lost a
• 2:50
  lot of points when. You when you say too light, what
• 2:54
  does that mean? I mean, you're not hitting the
• 2:56
  sign or not hitting it as as forcefully and as obviously you
• 3:00
  have a sense of it that, but I don't understand what that
• 3:03
  means. Yeah, so you're you're rolling
• 3:04
  your pit Rd. speed and then as you decelerate to come into your
• 3:07
  box, you want to go to the brake pedal once and just kind of slow
• 3:10
  down and get down to speed. One constant down.
• 3:14
  The two times before that I was coming in, I was slowing down
• 3:17
  and then having to get off the brake 'cause I was too slow and
• 3:20
  then reapply brake in order to stop at the spot that I needed
• 3:22
  to stop on. So I tried to hit that that one
• 3:25
  trajectory of just straight down of D cell and I missed.
• 3:30
  Go to Bob and then all the way in the back to Brian.
• 3:33
  Bob Power, Chris Fox Sports. I have two on that stop where
• 3:35
  you were called for paying outside the box, you can't see
• 3:38
  where your splitter is, correct? So you have to rely on one of
• 3:42
  the pit crew guys, I guess, where Randall says he couldn't
• 3:45
  see it either. Yeah.
• 3:46
  So typically in years past at JGR, we'd always have a system
• 3:51
  of it was the right, it was it's the changers responsibility.
• 3:56
  And then from there you or a guy behind the wall, like one of the
• 3:59
  pit crew support guys behind the wall needs to just start jumping
• 4:02
  up and down and waving like pushing back, pushing back.
• 4:05
  And that's what I did. Like when I stopped I came to a
• 4:07
  stop. I'm like man, I feel a little
• 4:09
  long, but I don't know. So I looked at the behind the
• 4:11
  wall guys and the behind the wall guys were like moving the
• 4:14
  hose and ready to catch a tire. You know, like they did that
• 4:17
  like that wasn't even something they were supposed to do.
• 4:19
  So we've talked about some of those things this week to to put
• 4:22
  more responsibility on more players so we can not have the
• 4:27
  penalty exist. But to to further Dustin's
• 4:30
  point, like you know the the 10 tenths on pit Rd.
• 4:34
  Like I'm really good at at getting all 10 and when I feel
• 4:37
  like I'm in a downward position when I'm behind or you know I'm
• 4:41
  going to try to get extra I'm going to try to get more.
• 4:43
  And yeah so that's led to my speeding penalties that's led to
• 4:46
  my sliding through the box is because I know I have to make up
• 4:49
  time on pit Rd. myself to kind of compensate for what we're
• 4:53
  losing when we're stopped in the box.
• 4:55
  So I know everybody at RC Rs busting their tail and working
• 4:58
  hard. I know that Ray and everybody in
• 5:00
  the pit stop department is it's just we got what we got and you
• 5:04
  know we've we've got to work through it.
• 5:05
  And then if that's changing players around, then then we've
• 5:08
  got to change players around and we've got to find something
• 5:10
  that's going to strengthen. You know, our our frontline, our
• 5:14
  defense whatever it is, whatever you want to call those guys
• 5:17
  special teams. You know, we we've got to find
• 5:19
  the, the, the players that are going to make it roll.
• 5:21
  I'm already number one on pit Rd. all the time.
• 5:23
  So like I'm trying to just build my gap of how close I am to that
• 5:26
  line. You know, like the last five
• 5:28
  years or whatever. Danny loves statistics.
• 5:31
  Ask him who number one on pit Rd's been.
• 5:33
  You know, so I take pride in that each and every year.
• 5:36
  I mean it doesn't really do you a whole lot but you know some
• 5:40
  teams give bonuses for that. I don't get bonuses for it, but
• 5:44
  some teams give that. I think 2311 actually does.
• 5:46
  So I don't think any of those guys are getting any.
• 5:49
  And do you like I obviously more changes this week.
• 5:54
  Is there a time of the year where you're like, OK, let's set
• 5:57
  a group and just kind of live and live or die with them?
• 6:00
  Or would you like a No matter what time of year it is, we just
• 6:04
  got to keep changing, put the best guys we feel we have in
• 6:07
  there. Well, I I feel like you got to
• 6:12
  keep getting the best guys you can get in there and change
• 6:14
  positions as you need to change. But honestly when you get down
• 6:18
  to the nitty gritty, you're going to run out of players.
• 6:21
  You know what I mean? The the depth chart is not very
• 6:24
  deep for guys on PIT Rd. that are the Excel group.
• 6:28
  You know I feel like there's an A group of of people's, there's
• 6:31
  AB group, there's AC group, just like drivers, there's an A
• 6:33
  group, AB group, AC group and so you know it's hard to get any of
• 6:38
  those available guys from that a group to come over to you
• 6:40
  because they're under contract. So you're kind of just you're
• 6:45
  you're basically playing with what's it in football, the
• 6:50
  practice squad, you know what I mean?
• 6:51
  You're pulling guys off the practice squad to see what you
• 6:53
  can find and and hopefully you hit one all.
• 6:57
  Right. We'll go on the back to Brian
• 6:59
  and then down here to Jeff. Brian Twining, Bets Media Group
• 7:03
  Last year your two races here in Phoenix were pretty much polar
• 7:06
  opposites. You performed pretty well in the
• 7:08
  spring and in the fall you just, you know, I mean, you weren't
• 7:11
  one of the Championship 4 contenders, unfortunately, But
• 7:14
  is there anything from either of those two races that you're
• 7:17
  really looking at when coming into this weekend with the new
• 7:20
  short track package? So the first race we struggled a
• 7:23
  little bit. We weren't that great.
• 7:25
  I think we did get an eighth place finish out of it, so we
• 7:28
  got to finish out of it, but we weren't very good.
• 7:30
  The second race though, I felt like we were really good.
• 7:32
  We were passing cars. We were fast.
• 7:34
  We had speed. But Pit Rd. happens.
• 7:38
  We I don't know how many positions we lost on pit Rd.
• 7:40
  here last fall but it was it was bad and so I kept trying to
• 7:44
  remake up the positions that we lost.
• 7:46
  I think we came down on our green flag pit cycle.
• 7:48
  We were in 8th or 7th or something like that.
• 7:50
  We came out 12th. So now I'm trying to make up for
• 7:52
  lost time and then I end up spinning myself out in that long
• 7:55
  run so that again you know everything kind of compounds
• 7:59
  itself and and puts on top of on top of on top of your your
• 8:04
  issues that you have that just makes your day entirely worse.
• 8:07
  But back to your question, the fall race, I felt like we were
• 8:10
  competitive. I felt like we were fast.
• 8:12
  I felt like we had a shock to if we had maintained every time on
• 8:16
  pit Rd. we would I think we could actually move forward
• 8:19
  throughout the day and get position.
• 8:20
  So we just need to be able to do that.
• 8:22
  All is, if you're not going backwards, then then that's a
• 8:26
  hell of a day for us. We'll go to Jeff and then over
• 8:30
  here to David and then we'll wrap with Lee.
• 8:33
  So, you know, obviously pit crews have always been, you
• 8:37
  know, a hot topic like people switch stuff.
• 8:38
  I mean, 20 years ago people switch crews out or, you know,
• 8:42
  to get faster stops and stuff. But is the reason that, like, is
• 8:47
  everybody so close now that that's why there's such an
• 8:49
  emphasis on this? Like they they've never mattered
• 8:51
  more than they have now in terms of the pit stops?
• 8:54
  Or is that too much of A leap compared to the past?
• 9:03
  I guess the I feel like the difference between 1st and 20th
• 9:07
  is much closer than it used to be.
• 9:09
  You know when I had my heyday of pit cruise at at JGR, we were
• 9:13
  running give the second bracket, let's just say we're running 12
• 9:16
  OS where the rest of JGR was 12 fives and then the rest of the
• 9:20
  competition was 13 OS. Now it's you're you're literally
• 9:23
  the whole field is if if you're not under 10 seconds, you're
• 9:26
  nobody, you know you might as well not even play but you've
• 9:31
  got to get to that. You got to get to that
• 9:32
  threshold. But there's now guys that are
• 9:34
  flying. I mean 8 eights, 8 nines, is is
• 9:38
  a good stop, a fast stop, 9 fours is probably about average.
• 9:42
  So yeah it's just you know we're we're all looking for what we
• 9:48
  can because on track at times the cars are so equal that it's
• 9:54
  hard to pass. On track, it's actually the
• 9:56
  easiest place to pass somebody else is when they're sitting
• 9:58
  still on Pit Rd. So we've we've got to be better
• 10:02
  on Pit Rd. We can't be going backwards.
• 10:04
  At least we're. Going to go over here to the
• 10:06
  right to David and then finish up with Lee.
• 10:09
  David Burnower, Cronkite News, Arizona PBS So 2015, you won the
• 10:14
  Xfinity Series race in Chicago and that night and a fan
• 10:18
  confused my dad for you. So what is the oddest experience
• 10:22
  you've had with a fan? The Who?
• 10:24
  The Honest. Or oddest odd weird.
• 10:30
  I just had one a couple weeks ago and I was like, man, that
• 10:32
  was pretty weird. I was like, that one's going up
• 10:35
  in the top five here and now I forget about it.
• 10:38
  It's not been that weird then. Shoot, I don't know.
• 10:44
  Normally I like, what's the weirdest thing you've ever
• 10:46
  autographed? I've had those before.
• 10:48
  That was. That's been a question.
• 10:50
  I was doing an autograph session one time for M&M's at M&M's
• 10:53
  World, and this lady was walking by, didn't even know that I was
• 10:56
  supposed to be or anything. But she was a race fan and was
• 10:59
  like, Oh my God, Kyle Busch, yadda yadda, whatever.
• 11:02
  Here, sign something and she's rummaging through her bag and
• 11:04
  I'm like, well, I can just sign your bag and she goes, no, no,
• 11:06
  no, you can't sign the bag. It was like a Prada diaper bag
• 11:09
  or some stuff. So can't sign that.
• 11:11
  So she pulls out a diaper. It was clean, but she pulled out
• 11:14
  a diaper. So I was like, OK, yeah, I can
• 11:17
  sign the baby's forehead. Ricky Bobby does those, but I
• 11:22
  don't know. Yeah.
• 11:23
  Besides that, there's there's been some others that just
• 11:26
  slipped my mind right now. Thank you.
• 11:28
  We'll take the last question from Lee here in the.
• 11:29
  Brown Lee Spencer Series X of NASCAR Radio and Catch fence.com
• 11:34
  Air blocking became a big topic last weekend after Kyle Larson
• 11:38
  was describing it. Can you take us through the
• 11:41
  nuances of that? And if you're the lead guy, you
• 11:43
  have to have a huge advantage with that technique.
• 11:46
  Is is that accurate? Yeah, it's way bigger with this
• 11:50
  car than it was the old car. This car's 30% worse.
• 11:53
  They're supposed to make it 30% better.
• 11:54
  That didn't happen. What?
• 11:58
  Who was it? It was look back to the race at.
• 12:01
  Was it Kansas? Was it Logano and Harvick?
• 12:03
  When Harvick ran up to Logano and then Logano just air blocked
• 12:06
  him and couldn't pass him. And so there was that race,
• 12:11
  which that was the old car, wasn't it?
• 12:13
  So I mean it, it happens always in anything.
• 12:16
  Trucks are that way. They're dead.
• 12:18
  Those guys are doing it somewhat, you know, but these
• 12:21
  Cup cars are, are really bad for that.
• 12:23
  You literally just wherever you go off in the corner, like you
• 12:27
  go off in the corner, and if you can watch your mirror and drive
• 12:31
  out front well enough, then you can just kind of like let your
• 12:34
  car go where it needs to go in order to air block that guy
• 12:36
  behind you. So I was doing that a little bit
• 12:39
  with Larson at the end of the first stage, just to try to hold
• 12:41
  him back some like I was. I was more.
• 12:43
  I wasn't necessarily air blocking him, I was more so
• 12:45
  trying to confuse him of where I was running, 'cause I wouldn't
• 12:48
  run the same line every time going back to the next end of
• 12:51
  the racetrack. Like I'd run high one lap, I'd
• 12:53
  run middle one lap, I'd run high, I'd run low.
• 12:55
  Like I just kept mixing it up. I wasn't necessarily air
• 12:57
  blocking, but I would say Kyle is really good at it.
• 13:03
  Joey's really good at it. Joey's really good at it.
• 13:07
  Running 12th, not for the lead. Briscoe last week was an
• 13:16
  absolute disaster with guys trying to do it and pulling
• 13:20
  slide jobs and everything else. But I mean there's yeah, you you
• 13:24
  try to do it as much as you can when when you know you got
• 13:27
  somebody, you got to hold off. And and real quick on on moving
• 13:30
  the restart zone at Coda. What they do, I don't know,
• 13:33
  back. To turn 20.
• 13:37
  Back to turn. OK, so.
• 13:39
  Just like so basically in coming around the last cornering before
• 13:42
  you. Uphill.
• 13:43
  Uh huh. So it's not going into the last
• 13:46
  corner. It's coming out.
• 13:47
  It's back to the old restart zone.
• 13:48
  Is that what I or it's before the turn Before?
• 13:51
  The turn. So it's like Indy was last year.
• 13:54
  Yeah, great, fantastic. Yes.
• 13:58
  Anything to give us more separation before calamity,
• 14:01
  corner of turn one would certainly be beneficial with the
• 14:04
  group of crazies that we have.