Kurt Busch Year Quotations

Last year Tony had trouble as well as Mayfield, and they never seemed to rebound. It's like a golf tournament. If you start off and you're 4- or 5-under and the other guys are waffling around par, they're not going to catch you. ... When you have a bad race early on it's just that much more difficult to overcome later on.

Last year we saw (Tony) Stewart have trouble as well as (Jeremy) Mayfield and they never seemed to rebound after that, ... It's just the pace. In a lot of ways it's like a golf tournament. If you start off and you're four- or five-under and the other guys are waffling around with a bogey and a par, they're not gonna catch you. It's up to the leader to make those mistakes and we did have a big mistake at Atlanta with the motor blowing up. That took away our solid advantage, so when you have a bad race early on it's just that much more difficult to overcome later on.

Frankly, I hope it does. They've run it all year long. It's been a matter of time before things were revealed.

Last year in the spring it was an alternator belt that broke when we were leading that took us out of contention, and then in the fall last year we were leading at the end before fuel strategy cost us the win. But Richmond is a terrific racetrack.

It feels good to get off to a great start. But we're just two races in. I'd like to say that we're a championship contender with the way we ended last year and we'll just try to keep our momentum rolling forward.

Seeing Tony do it last year at Indy, I was envious. I said, 'I want to do that at Vegas.' It's a big race for me and my little brother, of course. I watched the track get built from the ground up.

That's something I tried to do last year and again modeled that pattern this year -- just to run each of the regular-season races as if they were important, and they are definitely. But the final 10 and the intensity and pressure and anxiety to get to the racetrack and to have a solid finish . . . the final 10 is definitely so intense that you can wear yourself out before you even get there.

If you're running in the top-five during the race, usually you're single file, not three-wide pack, that's something you try to position yourself for. If you're stuck in the middle there's not much you can do. You don't want to get caught up in a wreck, so you have to decide if you want to go forward or if you want to hang out in the back and wait for a pit stop to jumble up the field. Qualifying is important, but, if you qualify up front, you can get shuffled to the back if you get into the wrong draft. We'll see how it shakes up. We have a good car. It's the car we ran seventh here earlier this year so I'm excited to bring it back.