Kyle Busch left Texas Motor Speedway with a 272-point lead over second-place driver Carl Edwards in the quest for the Nationwide Series crown. Busch, however, lost 25 of those points on Tuesday when NASCAR issued him a penalty for an improperly secured weight on his No. 18 car when it arrived at Texas Motor Speedway for last weekend's event.
Even so, Busch's lead over Edwards stands at 247 points with only two races to go. While he hasn't clinched his first NASCAR national series title just yet, he does pretty much have the champion's trophy in the bag. To clinch Saturday at Phoenix, he needs to have a 195-point lead over Edwards at the conclusion of Saturday's Able Body Labor 200 at Phoenix International Raceway.
Busch will also once again be going for the trifecta of Truck, Nationwide, and Sprint Cup series wins at the same track on the same weekend. That's something that's never been done in NASCAR national-level competition. He fell just one race short at Texas Motor Speedway last weekend -- winning the Camping World Truck and Nationwide races before running out of gas in the final laps of the Sprint Cup race on Sunday.
Busch won't be alone in his running of all three races this weekend. Kevin Harvick and Kevin Conway will also be attempting all three.
It will be Conway's debut in two of the three series -- Truck and Nationwide. It will also be his first race at Phoenix in the Nationwide Series, the series in which he is a regular.
“I’ve never been accused of doing things normally,” Conway said. “To make my Cup and Truck debuts at a track that I’ve never even seen is pretty ambitious but I’m excited to have the opportunity.”
While Busch holds a pretty commanding lead, the more contested points battles are the ones for second and fifth-place.
Edwards currently occupies the second position, but he only has a 20-point lead over third-place driver Brad Keselowski, heading into the final two races of the season.
“It’s pretty exciting to have moved that close to Car in the point standings," Keselowski said. "I really think we have a shot at finishing in second."
The battle for fifth is even tighter. Rookie Justin Allgaier, who is in the fifth spot right now, only has a 13-point cushion on sixth-place driver Mike Bliss, who is fighting for a spot in the top-five despite being behind the wheel of no fewer than six different rides in 2009.
Television coverage for Saturday's Able Body Labor 200 is scheduled for a 4 p.m. ET start on ESPN2.
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