LV’s Busch winds up 4th

Monday, Feb. 18, 2002 | 9:50 a.m.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Kurt Busch had a Daytona 500 victory in his sights with 30 laps remaining in the race and then he seemed destined for a 15th-place finish.

With a healthy dose of racing luck, the Las Vegas native walked away from Daytona International Speedway Sunday evening with a fourth-place finish and a $499,482 payday.

Busch, who ran in the top 20 the entire race, grabbed the lead from Sterling Marlin with 38 laps remaining and stayed out front until he made a regrettable decision on a restart with 23 laps to go.

"The only bad decision I made was trusting (Ricky Craven), when I was the leader, that he would help me out," Busch said. "He left me hanging out to dry. We were by ourselves and (Jeff Gordon) got too good of a run at us and we went from the lead to 15th."

Busch, who got shuffled out of the draft on the restart, was running in 15th place with six laps to go when a crash on another restart knocked out several cars ahead of him and moved him up to 10th.

After a red-flag period of nearly 20 minutes, the race restarted on lap 198 and Busch made up six spots in the final three laps to record his best finish at Daytona.

Although Busch acknowledged the late-race accident helped him, he said good luck made up for some misfortune earlier in the race.

"I'd say it was a fair finish," Busch said. "We were capable of running fourth if the whole field would have finished so I don't feel bad about the finish -- it's a matter of survival sometimes.

"We were positioned in the correct spot a couple of times if we hadn't got caught up in a wreck on each of those instances. We had (Kevin Harvick) get rattled by (Gordon, on lap 149) and from then on it was just chaos. We had about six close calls out there today."

The race was marred by nine caution periods -- including "The Big One" on lap 149 that involved 18 cars.

"It was a matter of survival," said Busch, who finished 41st last year in his first Daytona 500. "You try to just mind your own business a few times and then you try to be assertive and aggressive some other times.

"Everyone wanted to go to the front and they just took a lot of impatient drivers out. A lot of guys didn't use much patience and a whole new crop of drivers were up front today because the veterans seemed to want to go to the front and bully everybody around."

Busch led twice in the race, for a total of 16 laps. Prior to Sunday's race, his best finish in two races at the 2.5-mile oval was 30th place in the Pepsi 400 last July.

After struggling with underpowered cars for much of last season, Busch said it was nice to have a car that ran well for 500 miles.

"I've had a lot of good handling cars, just no good finishes because of mechanical issues," Busch said "I'm glad to see the engine stayed together and all the Roush teams performed well.

"We'll take this and step on it and move on."