Can Kyle Busch Bounce Back?

Sunday at Loudon was not the kind of day Kyle Busch expected. Coming into the Sprint Cup Chase for the Championship as the odds-on favorite to win it all, he left the track without saying a word to any members of the press, stopping only briefly in his hauler to speak with Joe Gibbs and a few other key members of his team.

The points-leader coming in caught a break on Friday when rain cancelled the qualifying session, causing NASCAR to set the starting grid by the rulebook, placing him once again on the pole. It was a great break as his car had not been very good during the first practice except in qualifying trim, and got even worse in race trim during the two practices on Saturday.

For 17 straight weeks Busch sat atop the leaderboard in points, and with a series leading eight wins, he came into Loudon as a man on course to win a championship. In fact, many pundits have been unable to decide whether he or two-time defending Cup champion Jimmie Johnson is most likely to be hoisting the coveted Sprint Cup at Homestead in November. 

And for those who wished to hedge their bets, Busch, Johnson, and Carl Edwards had been dubbed the "Big Three" as each had won three of the nine races leading into the chase. They account for 18 of the 26 wins in the "regular season."

But by lap 19, Busch's points, which had been reduced to 30 over Carl Edwards when they were reset for the chase, was fading and fading fast. A $25 part—a Heim joint, which connects the vehicle's left side sway bar to the lower control arm—had broken and left his No. 18 M&M's Toyota Camry all but completely undrivable.

In the corners Busch looked more like he was driving a dirt modified car at Eldora than a professional stock car. His car rolled to the right, seeming to pull the left front wheel completely off the ground at times. He managed to fight the car for the next 16 laps until the competition caution came out, giving his team a small window of opportunity to diagnose and to try to fix the problem.

Not only did they not get it fixed quickly enough, Busch was also penalized one lap for "passing under yellow" getting off and back on pit road while trying not to go down a lap. The No. 18 team headed back to the restart in 43rd place a lap down, hoping for a quick caution so they could get back into the pits, get their lap back, and fix the problem to get their driver back into contention.

But it was not to be. On lap 83, the rolling wreck finally materialized as the car broke loose and spun. Busch managed to keep the car off both the outside and inside walls, but "the wreck behind the wreck" caught up to him as Jamie McMurray spun himself trying to avoid another car checking up and slid into Busch's back left quarter panel as he rolled back toward the track.

From that moment on, the best the No. 18 team could hope for was to get the car fixed and simply log laps, hoping that others would have problems and have to drop out of the race, and some did. By staying on track and running fairly well given the damage, Busch managed to hang on long enough to move from 42nd to 34th place by the finish, and in the process move back up to eighth in the points standings.

The question now is whether or not Busch can bounce back. Many point to the fact that back in 2006 Jimmie Johnson finished 39th at Loudon and fell to over 130 points behind the leader, but managed to battle back to win the championship. In doing so, he won one race, had five top twos, six top 10s, and a finishing average of 7.67 over the last nine races.

Can Busch match that, and will it be enough? Looking ahead to the final nine races, Busch is going back to three tracks where he has already won this year—Dover, Talladega, and Atlanta. More importantly, now he's down and has something to shoot for.

As stated above, for 17 straight weeks Kyle sat atop the points with a target painted on his back. Each hard-earned win, each hard-fought loss, and each new confrontation seemed to bring on a new rivalry, but none seriously challenged his authority as the dominant force in the Cup series.

Although he didn't officially clinch his spot in the Chase until Michigan, he was far enough ahead in the points to have been able to take chances as far back as Pocono, if not sooner. 

Now, however, Busch is behind, and looking at the backs of seven drivers ahead of him in the race for the Cup. With nine races remaining, the time has come for that last restart, where Busch has so consistently excelled. Anyone who has watched "Rowdy" start from the back of the pack late in any race knows that he lives for the drama of a last minute charge through the field to the front.

YouTube and other video sites are chock full of examples of him driving the wheels off a truck, a Nationwide car, or a Cup car, passing others two and three at a time in the final laps while bearing down on the leader. Although he may not always come out victorious (or even in one piece), he does so more often than not, and in the process he always puts on a show.

So to answer the question whether or not Busch can bounce back from such an inauspicious beginning to the Chase that was long considered his for the taking, the answer is yes he can.

Whether or not he actually will has yet to be seen, and will definitely be the story to watch until the checkers fly at Homestead.

That's my $0.18. What's yours?