Steve Addington won more races than any other crew chief in the past two years, but that wasn't good enough for Kyle Busch. When Addington was fired last year with three races to go, older brother Kurt Busch was the first in line to offer him a job.
The new combination of Addington and Kurt Busch won Sunday's race at Atlanta Motor Speedway. At the same time, it gave Addington some satisfaction in knowing Kyle Busch hasn't won since he left Joe Gibbs Racing. Addington talked about working with a different Busch and his new job at Penske Racing after the race. Here are excerpts of that interview:
Q: How does it feel to get your first victory with Kurt Busch and Penske Racing?
A: It feels awesome to get that first win at Atlanta. This is the site of my first Cup win. To come back here and put this together, this was a team effort. It all started on Friday with the feedback from Kurt. You know, he told us, you know, we've got to work on this thing. If we're going to win, we got to work on this. We made a lot of adjustments. We hit on some stuff on Saturday. He was happy with it. We kind of messed around there. It was just like, hey, let's go back here, we're not that far off on the second run from Happy Hour. Let's adjust from there. That's what we did. And we felt confident going in. I slept good last night, you know. That was a different feeling than I've had in a long time, to be able to go in and rest because I felt confident that I had the feedback I needed to go out and win this race with Kurt Busch.
Q: After the way things ended with Kyle, do you feel like your had some unfinished business there? Do you feel vindicated?
A: I think if I denied that, I would be lying. You know, it feels good. It honestly feels good to be with this race team, with Kurt as the driver, and come back and win before the 18 car (Kyle) got a chance to win. That's a personal deal. There's nothing against that. I'm still great friends with Kyle and everything. But it's a good feeling. It's a relief in a certain way. It all comes back to the team. You know, I didn't win this race today. Kurt won this race with these guys on pit road, these guys that put this car together and worked on it through practice. This was a total team effort all weekend long.
Q: Is there added satisfaction, especially since you helped Kyle's brother win a race?
A: It's awesome. You know, and the thing that really I feel good about was when all that went down, I mean, I'm at a point, let's move on past that. But this guy right here, he's the first one that called, you know. So it's a good feeling to know that the driver wants you to come over here and go to work for him. That's the most satisfying thing, is to get him to Victory Lane. I hope we do it many more times together here this year. You know, I mean, I think that we can. He's been awesome to work with. Great feedback. The thing that I enjoy about it is, we can sit in that lounge three hours after practice, and he finally looked through all the stuff, go over with us, he'll go, 'All right, what do you want to do now?' It's like we talk about a lot of stuff. It's good to have somebody sitting in there. You know, we don't have to say a lot. We're all looking through the information together, looking at what we did, looking back at runs. It's very satisfying to be working with Kurt right now. I'm looking forward to it. I think that great things can happen with this race team. To answer your question, like I said earlier, to come back here, this is the place that I won my first race as a Cup crew chief, and it just happened to be his brother. That was very special. That was very big. But to be with a new organization, to have the relationship that I've already built in a short period of time with Kurt and this race team, this one's pretty damn special. To put it on a measuring stick, I can't, because I feel pretty darn good right now.
Q: There were two green-white-checkered re-starts at Atlanta with Kurt in the lead for both. How did you keep yourself from going crazy?
A: I looked over at our race engineer Dave Winston and told him, 'I used to get so nervous that I'd want to puke in this situation.' I said, 'Now it's out of our hands.' There's nothing we can do. We can't control any of this stuff. So you just sit there, you take what it is. You got to have confidence in your driver that he'll get it done. I had confidence in the driver to get it done.
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