Johnny Benson

This weekend’s Coca-Cola 600 is Sunday night at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Charlotte where Kyle Busch is my driver to beat. The 23-year-old from Las Vegas will be looking to add to his overall points lead by coming away from the 1.5-mile oval with his fourth win in 12 Cup starts this season.

Working in Busch’s favor
Last week’s engine woes in the All-Star event at LMS aside, everything seems to be working just right for Busch, who is having a breakthrough season. Not only does he lead in points but he also is second in the Nationwide Series and seventh in the Craftsman Truck Series.

Joe Gibbs Racing tried new engine packages last Saturday and the experiment failed as all three JGR drivers reported problems including Busch, whose engine blew up. That caused him to finish last. And while it is expected that the Gibbs-owned cars will go back to the engine packages they used prior to last weekend, it’s also important to remember that Busch in the No. 18 Toyota started on the pole in last weekend’s event and led for the race’s first 38 laps. So the engine switch worked – just not for very long. Did Busch have a car that was capable of winning? Absolutely.

So Sunday night Busch is back at LMS as a driver who is too tough to ignore simply because prior to the engine failure he won two of the three previous Cup races, including a triumph at Darlington, S.C. that made him the youngest winner ever at that track.

At LMS Busch has seven top-five finishes to go with his three victories. What’s more, he briefly held the lead in the Cup race at LMS last fall before Jeff Gordon passed him on a restart and pulled away from the rest of the field.

Other drivers to watch
Look for Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Carl Edwards, Jeff Burton, Tony Stewart, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. to all be pretty tough to beat on Sunday night. Gordon and Johnson simply did not run well at LMS last weekend but their past performances at the track are too good to ignore.

In his last 10 starts at LMS Johnson, the two-time defending Cup champion, has five victories, eight top-fives and nine top-10s. As a result, the El Cajon, Calif. native has compiled 1,715 points -- which is more than 300 points better than any other Cup driver during that span.

Gordon is currently 10th in points and is the only other active driver with five wins at LMS. He won the October race at the track last season and earned his first victory in the Cup series at LMS in 1994. Gordon and crew chief Steve Letarte are going all out in preparation for Sunday night’s race as they have tested extensively on intermediate tracks in recent weeks to better understand how the new Cup car handles on the quicker mile-and-a-half venues.

Stewart has 11 top-10 finishes in 18 LMS starts and he showed his mettle as he rallied to a top-five finish at LMS last weekend after running dead last in the 24-car field. Stewart will drive a brand new chassis with his normal engine package after the Joe Gibbs driver experienced engine trouble in practice last week.

Edwards does not have a long history at LMS but he certainly has been effective there. In six career starts at this venue the Missouri native has posted three top-fives, including third-place runs in this race in 2005 and 2006.

Junior, who is currently third in points, earned his lone win at LMS in the 2000 All-Star event. Included in his last eight starts at the track are top-five finishes in the 2005 and 2006 fall races.

Burton is second in points and needs 79 markers to catch Busch for the top spot. The veteran Richard Childress Racing driver will be making his 29th career start at LMS, where he has two victories. The first was a dramatic triumph in 1999, when he edged Bobby Labonte by less than a second. The other was in 2001, when he topped Kevin Harvick, one of his current RCR teammates.

My darkhorse is David Ragan mainly because he has top-fives in two of his last three races.

Keys to success at Lowe’s Motor Speedway
Racing the 600 miles is certainly no easy task as it is the longest race on the Sprint Cup schedule. A key factor will be that the race will start at 5:30 p.m. ET so during the event there could be some changing track conditions as night sets in requiring teams to adapt on the fly.

And with a new surface having been put down a couple of years ago, there's no question a very difficult challenge has gotten even more difficult. I tested at LMS last spring and the track has better grip than it has had at any point since the resurfacing. The surface has seasoned some more and the groove is starting to widen out so there will be some side-by-side racing. Probably after about 150 or 200 miles are run by the cars, the track will become friendlier for side-by-side racing.

There will be a bottom groove and eventually an outside groove and drivers will have to run both at least at some point in the event. But the drivers who best hug the bottom line should be the ones battling it out for the win.

As they have in the past hard tires could again prove a factor. With them it's very difficult to get good grip on the track for the first four or five laps after a tire change. With such a hard tire sometimes an issue called "chatter" comes into play. That's basically a vibrating sensation in the tires and it can be severe enough that drivers will be running on flats and not immediately realize it.

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