Kyle Busch’s challenge for the win at Charlotte Motor Speedway was only good enough for a third-place finish.
Every other Hendrick Motorsports driver finished within the first five positions, with Kyle Larson winning the race. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver battled for the second spot with Chase Elliott and William Byron but Larson was a class apart among the drivers.
After seeing Hendrick Motorsports drivers finish in the 1-2-3-4 position at Dover, Busch wanted to make sure that they didn’t repeat the feat again.
“Definitely, we had nothing for the Hendrick cars,” said Busch. “Overall, just a really good night for us. This M&M’s Camry was fast. Ben (Beshore, crew chief) and the boys did a really, really good job. I appreciate for all that we had – it was enough to go out there and run strong. I tried to break them up. I didn’t want them to finish 1-2-3-4 again, so at least I could get in the middle of them, but overall, good job.”
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Busch also spoke about the aspect that the HMS cars are better than JGR’s.
“When we were running there through some of the middle part of the race, we were wide open from one and two and just barely breathing it through three and four,” he continued. “You need to be wide open all the way around to complain about raw speed, but realistically, you just need to go from that corner (four) to that corner (one) faster and that’s straight line speed so that’s overall. They (Hendrick Motorsports) were fast and they look good under the hood and they had good aero too.”
JGR drivers haven’t had a bad season though. They have won five races so far with only Denny Hamlin yet to register a win. Even then, he leads the season points standings.
However, when asked about HMS performance to JGR, Busch gave a straightforward reply:
“Not close enough. On a one to 10, if (Kyle) Larson was a 10 tonight, we’re about a seven so we’ve got some work to do.”