Kyle Busch says JGR and MWR need to work better together
Kyle Busch would like to see the cars of Joe Gibbs Racing and Michael Waltrip Racing work together in a similar fashion to the cars from Hendrick Motorsports and Stewart-Haas Racing.
SHR gets its chassis and engines from Hendrick and while JGR and MWR use the same Toyota engines, they don't work toegether closely on chassis and engineering.
“We need to have an affiliation,’’ Busch said during a luncheon before Monday night’s Nationwide and Camping World Truck banquet. “It would be nice if MWR ... made us all eight. It would be better for all of us. There’s a couple of reasons that we’re fighting internally why we’re not mingling with those guys quite yet, but hopefully that gets resolved here soon.’’
Busch described the information shared between Joe Gibbs Racing and Michael Waltrip Racing as “informal. It’s like ... “Hey we’re running these four springs and bars and shocks,’ but in reality what’s your pivots, what’s this, what’s that, what’s everything else?’’
After winning the Sprint Cup Series championship Sunday night Kevin Harvick talked not only of the advice he got from co-owner Tony Stewart and Hendrick Motorsports driver Jimmie Johnson, but the way the two teams worked together sharing data.
This season, Busch and Denny Hamlin were the only Toyota drivers to win a race. And they each won one. Matt Kenseth went winless, and so did the MWR drivers of Brian Vickers and Clint Bowyer.
Toyota redesigned the 2015 Camry street car, and those visual changes will be reflected in the 2015 Cup cars. Toyota tested the new car at Auto Club Speedway. The two main Toyota teams working closer together could help get the new car up to speed (or build an advantage) quicker than both working somewhat independently of each other.
Plus, Joe Gibbs Racing is adding a fourth car next season for Carl Edwards. The team has been at three full-time cars since 2005.
"It was a good test," Toyota Racing Development president David Wilson said Saturday. "Certainly it's just one datapoint. There were only four cars on the racetrack. I think we're all anxiously anticipating how the new car with the different downforce and certainly a little bit less under the hood is going to react. I think we need a few more cars out on the racetrack to really figure that out, so we're going to‑‑ we've got another test coming up after the banquet week, and then we'll put the cars on the racetrack in Daytona next year"
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
