LOUDON, N.H. — With wet weather in Sunday afternoon’s forecast, New Hampshire Motor Speedway and NASCAR have moved the start time for the Foxwoods Resort Casino 301 to 1 p.m. instead of the originally scheduled 2 p.m.
All entry gates will open at 9 a.m. and all activities on the schedule will move up one hour, with the exception of the concert featuring Loverboy which will begin at 11 a.m. and be moved to the grass area in Turn 2.
KURT BUSCH is set to crank up contract talks with Stewart Haas-Racing.
With his deal expiring at the end of the season, the 2004 NASCAR Cup champion is on the hunt for a new agreement that would keep him in the SHR fold and with Monster Energy again on board as a primary sponsor.
“I don’t know many drivers that have a primary sponsor with them,” Busch said. “Monster Energy has been very loyal to me. That’s what they’ve told me. It’s just a matter of when is the time to start talking contract. Last year it went long just because I felt I deserved more.”
Busch didn’t sign for this season until last December. Though it seemed a formality he would re-sign, his status was in limbo once SHR declined a contract option in August.
Busch, 39, is in his fifth full season with SHR and has five of his career 29 wins with the team.
“There’s a lot of things that move so we’ll see how it all comes together,” Busch said.
Busch has a reputation as one of the best drivers in the game, and added to it Friday when he turned a lap of 133.591 mph in the No. 41 Ford to win the pole for the NASCAR race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Busch, who won his third pole of the season, was the only one of the four SHR drivers to reach the final round of qualifying. He needs the boost from starting out front – Busch hasn’t won a race since the 2017 Daytona 500 and has just three top-five finishes this season.
Busch is far from the only series champion who has failed to win this season. Jimmie Johnson and Brad Keselowski are also looking for their first victories.
Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick have 14 of this season’s 19 victories. Harvick and Busch each have five, Truex has four and the 16-spot playoff field is set to have more drivers qualify on points than through the automatic berths that come with a win.
Denny Hamlin, who won this race last season, also is looking for his first victory of 2018 and said his No. 11 Toyota is capable of joining the Big Three on a similar run.
“I don’t think we’ve been at that level to even be talked about at this point,” Hamlin said. “I think we’ve got to get better in a lot of different aspects. It’s agitating knowing that we’re capable of doing that if we just put everything together.”
FORMULA ONE: Max Verstappen set a lap record in leading the second practice for the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim, Germany.
Verstappen, a 20-year-old Dutch driver, clocked 1 minute, 13.085 seconds to eclipse Kimi Raikkonen’s time of 1:13.78 from 2004.
n Mercedes gave driver Valtteri Bottas a new one-year contract for 2019 with the option for an extra year.
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