Betting on anyone other than Kyle Busch for Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Jeff Byrd 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway is tantamount to throwing your money away at this point.
On Saturday, Busch won his fourth consecutive race at the track, taking the Scotts EZ Seed 300 for his second Nationwide win of the year – he has yet to visit Victory Lane in the Sprint Cup Series. In his 206th Nationwide start, Busch led his 10,000th lap in the series. No one else is close. Busch, who swept the Bristol weekend in August (including the Trucks Series), is the first back-to-back winner at the track since Steve Grissom in 1995.
Incidentally, Saturday was Danica Patrick’s last Nationwide race until the summer as she leaves to drive in the IndyCar Series. Her first trip to Bristol ended with a wrecked car in the wall after she got together with Ryan Truex. After getting out of her car, Patrick walked onto the track and held up her arms as Truex drove by under caution. She finished 33rd.
But back to Busch. He has finished first four times or second twice in the past nine Sprint Cup races at Bristol. In the past 10 races, he leads all drivers in wins (four, all from starts of 15th or worse), top-fives (six), top-10s (nine, including a current best streak of five in a row), laps led (1,218, 1,151 in the past three seasons; last year’s spring race is the only one during that span he has not led) and points earned (1,670; Carl Edwards was second with 1,443). Despite Kyle not leading at all in the spring race last year, he and brother Kurt led more than half of the laps at Bristol in 2010 (561 of 1,000).
If Busch doesn’t win it probably will be Edwards. He is on a roll, coming off a Cup win at Las Vegas to go with a second at Daytona following two wins to end the 2010 season. Friday’s pole win was his second in the past three races. Edwards should run with the leaders this weekend. An elite short-track racer, he has two career wins at Bristol and finished sixth in this race a year ago.
Jimmie Johnson doesn’t look right so far this year. After three races, the five-time defending champ is in 13th place in the standings. Right now his average finish is 15.3; if he finished the season with that average, it would be the lowest of his 10-year Cup career. But he won the spring race at Bristol last season.
Maybe Greg Biffle can finally get it together as he starts on the front row with Edwards. After finishes of 35th at Daytona, 20th at Phoenix and 28th at Las Vegas, Biffle is just 31st in the standings. Biffle is looking for his first lead-lap finish of the year.
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