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ROGERS IS ICE TO BUSCH'S FIRE

Dave Rogers is Kyle Busch’s crew chief on the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing M&M’S Toyota Camry. And that’s not always the easiest job in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.

Busch – while extremely talented and always a threat to win – can be mercurial at times, and Rogers (pictured alongside Busch celebrating last weekend’s Cup race victory at Bristol) isn’t one of the most outwardly expressive guys in the garage area. In fact, you could say that Rogers is the ice to Busch’s fire.

Yet, communication is a magic word among NASCAR teams at the highest levels, and the two seem to get it done every week.

Nearing the end of last season, Busch and crew chief Steve Addington decided to go their separate ways. Busch asked for Rogers, who was the crew chief on the No. 20 JGR Toyotas driven mostly by Joey Logano in the Nationwide Series.

Last Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway, with the first anniversary of their partnership fast approaching and Busch and the No. 18 a virtual certainty for a spot in the 10-race Chase to the Sprint Cup, Rogers was asked why he’d said yes to making the switch.

“Because Kyle Busch asked me,” he replied. “Kyle is a special driver and in my opinion the most talented driver on the circuit. I told him before the race, there's a lot of fans out there booing him and some wise guys saying some things that were somewhat unprofessional, but it’s an absolute honor to work with Kyle Busch. I couldn’t be happier to do so.”

This is a lot different than Rogers’ first foray into the top series. That came in 2005 with Jason Leffler as the driver of the No. 11 FedEx team at JGR. Neither Rogers nor Leffler lasted the season, and Denny Hamlin and Mike Ford took over.

Fast-forward to Saturday night at Bristol, when Rogers provided the platform for Busch to complete that historic three-race sweep of the weekend’s national-division races.

The team wasn’t happy on Friday in practice, and Rogers, consummate problem-solver, spent all day Friday and most of Saturday making changes.

“We came off the truck really slow, and the car wasn't handling well at all, and I’m just really proud of Kyle for sticking with us and giving us good feedback,” he says. “We had great notes to go off from [Friday] night, and [Saturday] morning we made a number of adjustments based on feedback we got, so the car was much better and allowed Kyle to do what he needs to do.”

Rogers, acting as the ice to Busch’s fire, has managed to help focus the wild young talent by relentlessly being logical.

“He beats himself up,” Rogers says. “First he'll argue with you, and then you'll start to argue back with him, and he'll say, ‘OK, why, why do you say that? Why do you say I'm so good?’

“We've got to keep him pumped up, because he won Bristol, he's probably about five minutes away from forgetting about it and figuring out how to win this off-road truck race on Wednesday.”

As a result, Busch has changed a little bit as well.

“I'm not going to say that just in one night we've turned it around,” he says. “You know, I feel like we've got to show ourselves next week at Atlanta, a place I'm not very strong at, and at Richmond, another place I tend to run well at, we need…for the last nine weeks, the way we've run, we could have finished better; we should have finished better.

“I made mistakes, maybe Dave would admit to making just a couple mistakes.”

Here’s the key to Rogers and Busch, from Busch’s mouth.

“But I feel like we do it as a team. We win and lose as a team,” says Busch. “That’s what we've talked about and we're here to do going forward. It’s what we did this weekend – keep communicating on what we can do to try to make the cars better. I've had winning cars at places before, so there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to return to that. But sometimes guys just hit it and figure it out a little bit better than you, and you've got to comprehend that sometimes, too.”

As an example of the communication working, and how Rogers is able to interpret the feedback, take Friday’s practice sessions.

“I think Kyle was working on some race times,” Rogers says. “I think he could have gone out and practiced and posted quicker times if he just wanted to post the quick times, but he was trying to work on his race car. And we were off a little bit. We definitely didn't have a car capable of winning.

“But Kyle just kept his head in the game, kept giving us feedback, giving us direction. He did a great job this weekend of directing the race team and giving us information so we could make good decisions this morning.”

That has a lot to with Rogers’ influence on Busch. Rogers sees it as his job to give Busch a car that he can race, hopefully for the victory, and that’s what he focuses on. He called Jason Ratcliff, Busch’s Nationwide crew chief, to ask what he did to Busch’s car Friday night.

“I called him up Saturday morning and said, ‘Look, man, you weren't a race-winning car in practice; what did you do?’ He told me what he did to work on his car to make it better, which gave me more confidence in making the changes I needed to make today.

“I think you've got to give Kyle Busch a lot of credit, too, for knowing what he needed to go out there and race and then, when they drop the green flag, he knows how to race.”

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