Hurdles hinder Busch’s chances

Monday, Aug. 9, 2004 | 9:31 a.m.

INDIANAPOLIS -- It's doubtful if Kurt Busch ever had to work as hard for a 10th-place finish as he did Sunday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Busch, a Las Vegas native, overcame a cut tire, a pit-road scrape with Kevin Harvick and no less than five near-misses with spinning cars to post his third top-10 finish in four Brickyard 400 starts.

"It's not the day we wanted," Busch said. "We had a top-five car and just never got there because of all the circumstances and all the hurdles we had to overcome. It certainly was a hard-fought 10th-place finish."

Busch was running in ninth place when Tony Stewart blew a tire and spun out in Turn 2 just 23 laps into the race. Busch made a nice move to avoid contact with the spinning car, but cut a tire in the process, which resulted in Busch losing his rear brakes for the remainder of the race.

After pitting several times under caution to repair the damage, Busch restarted the race in 37th place. Busch had worked himself back into the top 10 when he and Harvick got together during a yellow-flag pit stop midway through the race.

"I was going pit-road speed -- which is about three car-lengths quicker than him every pit stall or so and he decided to run over my right-front fender," Busch said. "So, we end up having to make aerodynamic repair.

"It was just one of those days where nothing fell into place except for the finish, and we're thankful for that."

Busch was in 13th place on the final race restart -- the first green-white-checkered restart since NASCAR implemented the rule last month -- and gained three positions in the final two laps.

"It was a green-white-checkered (finish) and we got a top-10 out of it," said Busch, who remained seventh in NASCAR Nextel Cup points.

Brendan Gaughan, the other Las Vegas native in the race, wasn't around long enough to take advantage of the green-white-checkered finish. Gaughan was in 13th place when he suffered a cut tire and crashed hard into the Turn 2 wall after he was bumped on lap 96 by fellow rookie Kasey Kahne.

"Kahne came up there with all that metal sticking out of the edge of (his car) and just left-rear-tired us and gave us a flat right before we could do anything," Gaughan said. "I'm OK -- thanks to NASCAR and the SAFER walls; they still hurt when you hit them, but it does take some of the impact out."

Gaughan finished 35th in his Brickyard 400 debut.

JUNIOR FINISHES: Dale Earnhardt Jr. was able to finish a race Sunday for the first time since he suffered serious burns in a sports-car race three weeks ago. But that came as little consolation to Earnhardt, who lost a top-10 finish when he cut a tire on the final lap of the Brickyard 400 and finished 27th.

Earnhardt remained third in Nextel Cup points and gained 47 points on series leader Jimmie Johnson, who dropped out after 88 laps with a blown engine.

ROUGH DAY: Polesitter Casey Mears led the first two laps Sunday but quickly fell out of contention after being involved in a couple incidents early in the race and then cutting a tire. He settled for a 26th-place finish.

Mears, who slipped back to eighth place in the first 10 laps, traded paint with Kahne in the opening laps of the race and then narrowly escaped disaster midway through the race as he got ahead of an eight-car wreck on the frontstretch.

"We've got a lot of work to do to get the racecar right. We can qualify, but I feel like we're a little off on the setup. I'm upset; I wanted to run better."

BRIEFLY: Kahne's fourth-place finish was his eighth top-10 showing of his rookie season and allowed him to move to within 31 points of 10th place in the Nextel Cup standings. ... Veteran Bill Elliott scored his best finish (ninth) in four starts this season. ... Defending Brickyard 400 champion Harvick finished eighth Sunday.