Pointing for Indy

Friday, Aug. 6, 2004 | 10:17 a.m.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Although he is mired in a battle to remain in the top 10 in NASCAR Nextel Cup points and qualify for the 10-race "Chase for the Championship," Kurt Busch insisted he isn't altering his approach to Sunday's Brickyard 400 or any of the other five remaining "regular-season" races.

But that doesn't mean that this weekend's race at the historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway is just an ordinary event for Busch, a Las Vegas native who celebrated his 26th birthday on Wednesday.

"Everyone wants to win at Indy -- no matter what form of motor sports you're competing in," Busch said. "We've had some good finishes here, but we'd love to be able to cross that yard of bricks first when the checkers come out on Sunday afternoon.

"It would certainly help us out from a points perspective as well."

Busch enters his fourth career Brickyard 400 start ranked seventh in the Nextel Cup standings, but is only 61 points ahead of 10th-place Kevin Harvick. Although he has been among the top 10 in points for 19 consecutive races and has two victories this season, Busch is well aware of the fact that his position as it relates to the "post season" is a precarious one.

"Obviously, it would be nice to have a bigger cushion but I believe that we're a team that can persevere through any type of circumstance and make sure that we can get our way into the top 10," Busch said.

"Right now we're seventh, we've got a couple wins and we've got some good tracks coming up where we've had some success in the past, so I believe that we'll have a good opportunity to (remain) in the top 10."

Because of his success to this point in the season -- he has eight top-10 finishes in 20 races -- Busch said he and crew chief Jimmy Fennig have no plans to change their strategy in the final six races of the regular season.

"It's still the same process on how to set up cars and how to try to get the best finish each race," Busch said. "One thing that we have changed in our program is to save tests for the final 10 races. We've already tested at Dover ... and we're going to go and test at four of those tracks (that host the final 10 races) because those are the tracks that are important to us.

"You've still got to gain as many points as you can each race. When you do have a bad day, it doesn't hurt as bad, but you still have to make sure that you work your way into the top 10. We just can't afford to have anything like we had last week with the transmission failure."

The DNF last weekend at Pocono was only the second of the season for Busch, who was coming off a victory the week before at New Hampshire. Although his bad luck has seemed to have come in bunches during his first three seasons in NASCAR's premier series, Busch expressed confidence that his team will be able to ward off a potentially disastrous slump in the next five weeks.

"I believe when you have a group of guys that has worked together for as long as the 97 team has, you're able to overcome the bad luck and the adversity," Busch said. "It's a great program that Jimmy Fennig has put together where guys have a specific task and then another guys overlooks that -- everybody seems to overlap one another so that nothing is left behind and it's easier for everybody to work together.

"(As a driver), you've got to be able to just wipe out what happened the week before, whether it was a win or whether it was a bad race. Each week is a new opportunity for things to happen and things to go your way or things to go against you and the team has to pull together and make sure that they can even it all out."

Busch comes to Indianapolis with the confidence that he has raced well here in the past. As a rookie in 2001, Busch overcame a poor qualifying effort and raced among the leaders for the final two-third of the race before finishing fifth. The following year, Busch was knocked out of the race by Jimmy Spencer and finished 41st -- but not before Busch had driven from 38th to 16th in only 35 laps.

Last year, Busch turned in his best qualifying effort (sixth) at the Brickyard and posted a seventh-place finish despite battling handling problems with his car.

"It's a very historic racetrack and it's so special to me just being able to drive there," Busch said, "and then to have the success that we've had there with some top-10 finishes, it's even that much more special. Indy hands out the same amount of points as every other track at the end of the day, but there is definitely something very special about this place.

"There are probably a half a dozen races throughout the year that are more significant than others just due to the value of the race -- whether it's the actual track or the market it's in or whether it's the Sharpie 500 (at Bristol Motor Speedway) because my sponsor also sponsors the race. Indy is definitely one of those top five or six tracks that you have a different feeling about and you definitely want to win."