Busch, Edwards seek Charlotte win ahead of looming ‘Dega – Nascar

MORE: Live radar | Friday on-track action canceled due to weather

CONCORD, N.C. — Kyle Busch has celebrated in Victory Lane at 21 different race tracks in the Sprint Cup Series, from superspeedways to short tracks to road courses.

But in his 13-year Sprint Cup Series career, two tracks have eluded the No. 18 driver: Pocono Raceway and Charlotte Motor Speedway, site of Saturday’s Bank of America 500 (7 p.m. ET, NBC, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

“It would certainly mean a lot,” Busch said on reaching Charlotte’s Victory Lane on Thursday at the 1.5-mile speedway. “We’ve been trying here for a long, long time and we’ve been close a few times and it just hasn’t all quite worked out the way we would have wanted it to I guess at the end of some of the races. So certainly we feel as though there’s no better opportunity to win a Charlotte race than in the Chase.”

A win at Charlotte would do more than check a box off Busch’s lengthy list of racing accomplishments: It would punch his ticket to the Round of 8 drivers in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

With wildcard Talladega looming at the end of the three-race round, that security is especially coveted.

“Somebody’s going to leave here really happy and I hope it’s me,” Carl Edwards said Friday at Charlotte. “This round I believe is probably the toughest one just with Talladega out there and these mile-and-a-halves. It’s so competitive right now. We saw it with the first round. You’d think that making the 12-out-of-16 would be easy. It’s actually — it was a pretty good battle there, so we hope to get a victory here.”

One of the biggest competitors for the Joe Gibbs Racing duo? The JGR-affiliated car of Martin Truex Jr., who has won three of the last five Sprint Cup races. His three recent trips to Victory Lane equal the four-car JGR’s total Sprint Cup wins in the last 10 races.

For Edwards, the No. 78 success foreshadows Joe Gibbs Racing‘s performances to come in the Chase.

“If we didn’t know what engines and chassis and setups those guys had, it’d be really easy to say they’ve got something (that) they’ve got something special that we don’t have,” Edwards said.

“But knowing what they have and knowing what they’re able to do with it, that’s a motivator and I’ve been telling people this week I really believe you’re going to see … the four JGR cars really step it up because Martin (Truex Jr.) is … that rabbit out there that we’re all chasing and we know it can be done and I think in the end that’s a gift to have somebody in your camp or close to you that can do that.”

The four Joe Gibbs Racing cars also have access to the No. 78 team’s notes from their dominant Coca-Cola 600 win, something Busch believes is an advantage with limited practice time due to inclement weather. 

“They were really, really good,” Busch said on the No. 78’s winning Coca-Cola 600 run. “So we feel like we’ve got a good baseline to base ourselves off of.”

“If we could get Cole (Pearn, crew chief for Truex Jr.) to tell us everything, that would help,” Edwards said with a smile. “But I mean seriously those guys are so good that it gives us a lot of optimism, because there’s no — everybody’s looking up, looking forward.”