Last August on an impossibly hot 100-degree day at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, Kurt Busch, dressed in his Miller Lite driving suit, sat in the lobby of the Penske Racing South transporter, the air conditioner dong all it could to beat back the oppressive heat. With only two races remaining before the start of 10-race NASCAR Chase for the Sprint Cup championship “playoff”, Busch didn’t exactly look like a defeated man. He did, however, appear to be a bit exasperated. The 2004 NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion — a man certainly not only accustomed to winning, but a man who expected to be winning — sat 19th in points and was, in no way, shape or form, going to have a shot at NASCAR’s premier title in 2008.

“It’s definitely tough because we didn’t live up to our expectations,” sighed Busch. “We want more wins. We want to be more competitive. Roger Penske’s belief is that, ‘Hey, you just have to have a competitive car to give yourself a chance to win.’ Right now we’re just not getting our new car at the level that some of the other teams have it. It’s a character-building year. It’s tough going through the rough spots. You sit there and grade all of your years of racing. You’re going to have good ones and you’re going to have your bad ones. With these tough ones, you almost learn more than you do on the good years. But we’re working on it. We’re building different styles of racecars now. We’re trying off the wall-type set-ups. Still, we’re getting some of the same mediocre results. So, we still haven’t found it; we still haven’t pinned down exactly what we’re missing.

“I know that we’ll get the ship turned around and in the right direction quick,” he then added, exuding optimism. “Things are on the go. We’re on the go. With that, I feel like we’re making positive changes to make our team better for 2009.”

It’s now the February of 2009 and the season-opening Daytona 500 is but two weeks away. For Busch, along with every other NASCAR Sprint Cup driver, 2009 is the great wide open. Since NASCAR mandated a “no testing” ban over the winter, virtually every team headed south to the Atlantic Ocean beach town has no clear idea of where their equipment stacks up in comparison to the competition. Nonetheless, Busch, who placed 18 in the final points when the ’08 season finished up outside of Miami, feels good about things, his 2009 Penske Racing Dodge Charger sporting some new bodywork, and even more importantly, a new engine.

"I feel like the engine department picked up speed with us running the new R6 and I feel like us experimenting with setups helped us quite a bit," Busch explained of the “overhaul” the team performed throughout the off-season.

As Busch alluded to at Fontana last August, the “character building” mode the team segued into during the later part of the summer has translated into a number of positive changes for 2009. Crew chief Pat Tryson explains: "The biggest thing we've learned is that one, we had to get our cars a little better and we worked real hard and we're still working on that, and we have to make the most of what we do have on that day," Tryson told SceneDaily.com. "We can't let ourselves get frustrated and try to take a 20th-place car and make it a first-place car. That's not going to happen. We've got to realize we have a 20th-place car and try to get 15th and take what points we can gain on that day instead of putting ourselves in position where we finished 30th because we got frustrated and tried things we should not have tried."

So now it’s onto the 2.5-mile Trioval that Bill France Senior built. Busch, his front bumper shoving then teammate Ryan Newman to victory at the 500 last February, knows he and the Penske Dodge have the potential to run well on the 31-degree high banks. Well enough, perhaps, to draft their way into a run at the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup.

Eric Johnson