Kyle Busch bested big brother, Kurt, in pole qualifying for Sunday's Shelby 427 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway by two-tenths of a mile per hour faster, or four one-hundredths of a second.
But the younger Busch won't get to enjoy the fruits of his labor because an engine change from earlier in the day will force him to move to the back of the field.
It was on Lap 4 of the first practice session, that the motor in the No. 18 M&M's Toyota gave way and sent Kyle to the garage. He came back out in the second practice session and laid down a pretty good lap but he said he never got to run a lap in qualifying trim, so he was glad his Toyota was fast.
"It's cool that we're both up there but unfortunately for myself, I won't be in the cool photo at the drop of the green flag, next to my brother," Kyle said. "I'll have to drop to the back of the field for the engine change.
"I didn't know what to expect so I just gave it what I thought it needed in order to run a fast lap and it stuck pretty good. It was just a little bit edgy in three and four coming to the green."
Kyle said early on to his brother that he didn't think either of their qualifying laps would hold up.
"Apparently we were both wrong in figuring what the fast time was going to be," Kyle said.
Kurt said he would have liked to seen which one of them would get to Turn 1 first but that he can't get "caught up" in that.
"It felt like I had a solid run through (Turns) 1 & 2 and after looking at the lap tracker, Kyle had a little bit better in 1 & 2 and that enabled him to beat us by a little bit," Kurt said. "I felt that…like Kyle did…a lot of guys were going to come up (later in qualifying) and knock us off. It feels good with the Miller Lite Dodge to be running good. We qualified fourth last week and second this week. It’s just been a long offseason scratching our heads trying to find a good direction and so far it’s paid off.”
Jimmie Johnson qualified for Sunday's race in the third position and there were two surprises to round out the Top 5. David Reutimann and Marcos Ambrose, were fourth and fifth, respectively.
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