By Caleb Whisler, Staff Writer
For the first time this season, Kyle Busch will receive a DNF after running third during the AAA 400 at Dover International Speedway.
The culprit was a broken drive shaft that officially broke on Lap 272 during the 400-lap event. Throughout the race, Busch has been complaining to the team about a vibration.
“It just kept getting worse and worse the more the day was going, especially after restarts it was really, really bad, so I was just trying to bide it out, see if we’d make it to the end. At first, I thought that it was an engine problem, but that wasn’t the case. It was certainly in the drivetrain – something else,” Busch stated.
“You know, this isn’t very popular of a failure for us, so we have an idea – I already know what was wrong – but we’ve got to go back to the shop and kind of diagnose and figure out why it was wrong and kind of go from there.”
Busch believed that barring the circumstances that he had a top-three car. Because the vibration got worse, Busch had trouble with the handling of the car.
“I felt like I could get up there and race with the 4 (Kevin Harvick) or the 2 (Brad Keselowski), but as bad as that vibration kept getting throughout the race there it was just too hard to handle and finally it threw the shifter knob off the shifter and there was – even when it broke, I could just push the clutch in. I couldn’t even grab the shifter in order to get it knocked out of gear or anything like that. It was so hard – still vibrating so badly.”
Busch finished the race in the 35th position.