Kyle Busch, the 2015 NASCAR Cup Series champion driver, and Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series car owner Bob Leavine were vocal about their dislike for the 2019 aerodynamic rules package in the Gander RV 400 at Dover International Speedway on Monday.
“The package sucks. No f***ing question about it. It’s terrible,” Busch said after finishing 10th in the race. "All I can do is bitch about it and fall on deaf ears and we’ll come back with the same thing it in the fall.”
Leavine, then, tweeted his agreement.
“Let me second @KyleBusch statement, this package sucks,” Leavine [@BLeavine] tweeted. "Has nothing to do with where he finished.”
Busch first spoke up about the Dover variation of the rules package that gives cars 75 hp on the one-mile track Friday. More than 20 cars surpassed the track qualifying record speed in opening practice, and five surpassed the old record in qualifying.
“You pretty much know as a driver what too fast is,” 2015 champion Kyle Busch said Friday. “If you have a problem here with the speeds we are carrying into the corner, it is going to hurt. The faster you go, the harder you are going to hit the wall. The IndyCar guys were flying around here, and they don’t come here anymore, because it was too fast, too dangerous for them. Eventually, there comes a point where it becomes too fast for a stock car too. Whether that is or not, I guess that is people other than myself to think, but I would much rather appreciate racing and being able to race at a more tolerable speed than we are going right now.”
After the race, criticism tranistioned from safety to difficulty passing.
“It was definitely really hard to pass,” Martin Truex Jr. said. “There’s no question about that. I got stuck behind lapped cars multiple times. If you were running the bottom and they were running a lane up, you were good. If they decided just to cut to the bottom in front of you and shut your air off, you about drive into the fence off the corner. It’s tough.”
Truex won the race after starting in the back. Alex Bowman finished second after, like Truex, starting in the back.
Fourth-place finisher Kevin Harvick also was critical, citing passing difficulty.
“As you look at the cars behind each other, especially there at the end, there was hardly anybody who could pass anybody,” Harvick said. "You lose so much downforce behind each other every week that, from a driver’s standpoint, it becomes frustration. It’s difficult to maneuver your car to make up positions, because they become so aero-bad behind each other. Our guys on our Jimmy John’s Ford did a good job today, we just got super tight the last run stuck behind the 42 [Kyle Larson]. We just couldn’t go anywhere.”
Monday's race include the second-highest number of green-flag passes in a Cup Series race at Dover in the last six years.
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