Kurt Busch Guy 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.

Everybody wants to win Daytona. There's only one guy that's happy when we leave and that's the winner. California is really where the season starts.

It was like the ghost of racing past. I knew it was going to come down to that. ... I can't believe I lost, but Mark is the guy to beat when you're racing IROC.

You can still be a competitor and be well-rounded. You've got to have that edge on the track. It's just a matter of flipping a switch and becoming a good guy with your public image.

Just a ton of excitement, and the way the guys are together on this, they're looking at me to grow and to learn, and I'm looking at them to grow and to learn.

One thing that really helped me decide that I needed to go was their program of consolidating all the cars. I used to have a plate where they built my cars. One guy was the leader, they had a couple of 'grunts' around him and they built the car. That guy had spent 10 years of his life working up the stepladder to become a plate leader. Now, they have him putting right-front fenders on all five cars. The personality and identity is gone. I think that's a mistake as far as operating a business. We'll see how that turns out for them.

I'm still the down-to-earth guy who'd rather go have dinner with my grandma and her meatloaf than go out and do things with some friends.

That's what makes our sport so unique. You can sit there and watch it on TV, and you get more of the perspective of the pit strategy and the way the guys are passing each other out on the track. Then when you come to the race, you lose a little bit of that, but you can still see live what's going on, and you can get a scanner and hear the teams and what transmissions go back and forth. And you have the smell, you've got the sight, the feel. When cars come by at 200 miles an hour, it blows you away.