Kyle Busch says momentum does matter heading into NASCAR championship race

Kyle Busch feels good about where he is headed into Homestead, and that could be trouble for the rest of the Championship 4.

Momentum matters in pro sports. Or maybe it doesn’t. There’s definitely no consensus overall, and that’s true in NASCAR as well. But if it does matter, then Kyle Busch is sitting pretty when it comes to the Ford EcoBoost, which will crown the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series champion Sunday afternoon at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Busch has season-long momentum thanks to eight wins with his No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota team, tying Kevin Harvick for most of any driver — and unlike Harvick, Busch wasn’t assessed penalties for any of his victories. He also has short-term momentum after winning last week at ISM Raceway.

As Busch explained to FanSided by email before championship weekend, he and his crew likely would have been just fine without that final victory, but it did help reinforce the idea that they are where they want to be at this point in the playoffs.

“I don’t think it was a hundred percent necessary, but obviously it feels good to be able to score the win,” Busch said. “You know, you always want to have good momentum on your side.  I think this is the best thing for me, for our team, to be able to know that we’re ready to go for this week and we’re as best prepared as we can possibly be.  If we came out of Phoenix with a second or third or fourth or fifth or something like that, I think that would have been a positive day, as well, that we could have rode high going into Miami next week thinking that we’d still have a good shot to be able to go out there and perform the way we need to in Miami.”

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The way they need to run might mean winning the race. That’s been necessary each of the last four seasons, and considering how little has separated the Big 3 all year and the way Joey Logano has forced himself into the discussion, no one expects, say, a 12th-place finish to be enough to earn the crown.

Busch fully expects that he might end up running right around the drivers he’s competing against for the championship, maybe even at the front of the field.

“There’s no question that there will be a point in next week’s race that we will all be running one, two, three, four,” he said. “It’s happened every single time these last four years that I’ve been in the playoff race at Homestead, that all of us have been around one another at one point or another in the race.  The long green flag runs tend to separate you a little bit more. I remember the year that I won in 2015, Jeff Gordon was out there and we were all top four, top five riding around one another, whatever, and over the course of that long green flag run that we had, I think Jeff kind of faded and fell back to like eighth or ninth or something like that. Those are the times in which yourself and your team and your car and everything kind of brings itself to the forefront, so we’ll concentrate on our car and see where things fall.”

Another kind of momentum for Busch will reach its conclusion at Homestead, and that’s the #18n18 promotion his sponsor M&M’s has been running on social media. While the driver is often greeted with a mixed reaction from the fans in the stands at many tracks, there’s no question that his backers are vocal in their support, and the driver has taken notice of their enthusiasm throughout the campaign that ran this year.

“I loved seeing all the entries for the promotion,” Busch said. “I have been on social media taking a look and responding to some of my favorites. Rowdy Nation really are the best fans out there, so I am glad M&M’S came up with such a cool promotion to help reward them for all the support they have given us. It’s been really neat to have the fans on my car, as well as meeting the competition winners, Trevor and Sara in Las Vegas. I hope it has created some great memories for those fans. It’s been fun having them riding along with us.”

It’s obvious that Busch has momentum in both performance and support. He won the Ford EcoBoost 400 just a few years ago in this exact same situation, so you can throw experience into the mix as well. Will those factors add up to a victory at Homestead? We’ll know soon enough.