After opening up the season at Daytona, the NASCAR Cup Series is back at another superspeedway in Talladega. The 2.66-mile oval in Alabama will test limits to the extreme this Sunday as drivers, including Kyle Busch, try to stay out of accidents and secure a positive result.
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The two-time champion spoke to the press ahead of the race and detailed the most crucial aspects of superspeedway racing.
One such crucial aspect is called drafting, which is a technique that drivers use to reduce air resistance in such tracks. The lead car creates a low-pressure zone behind it, and the car behind it enters this area to reduce drag and maximise speed. Busch touched on how the Next Gen car has changed this process since 2022.
He said, “The energy in the draft now is not necessarily coming from ahead of you, it’s more so coming from behind you.”
“Two, three, four, five cars behind you is where that energy develops, and you get pushed forward from that energy. So, the draft is different from what it used to be.” It used to be that a driver would ride up to the bumper of the car in front of him and slingshot past it. That’s now changed to relying much on the drivers who are lining up behind him.
So, how does one know which cars are running farther behind him? Rear-view mirrors can only do so much when racing at over 200 miles per hour. This is where spotters come to be of great aid.
“Communication with your spotter is the ultimate,” Busch added. “There’s nothing else that you use as much as your spotter on speedway racing.”
“You can use your mirrors and look in the camera and look behind you and whatnot. But, trying to figure out a way of being able to understand the energy that’s coming rows back behind you, the only way to get that is from your spotter.” Busch’s spotter is Derek Kneeland, the former spotter of Tyler Reddick when he was a driver at Richard Childress Racing.
How racing strategies have evolved at superspeedways
The Next Gen essentially changed many elements of stock car racing. One of the most controversial additions it brought forth is the use of fuel-saving strategies on superspeedways.
What drivers do is drive at half-throttle for a major period of the race to save fuel, extend their time on the track, and reduce their time on pit road. It helps them win races at the cost of entertainment.
Busch said about this, “I would say we all want to go out there and run as hard as we can, as fast as we can, pass and mix it up and do all that sort of stuff.”
“But a lot of times it’s just better and it’s easier and it’s safer to just ride in line, part throttle, and save fuel. So it’s definitely a whole new arena that we’ve got to get used to what speedway racing is.”
The Richard Childress Racing star driver is yet to secure a victory in 2025. Hopefully, he will make use of the understanding he has of Talladega to break the curse and get back to Victory Lane. He has won at the track on two occasions. The most recent of them was in 2023, and the earlier was back in 2008 when he drove for Joe Gibbs Racing.
