By Reid Spencer, Sporting News Wire Service
February 23, 2008
11:04 PM EST

FONTANA, Calif. — For the second consecutive day, rain played havoc with the racing schedule at Auto Club Speedway, forcing postponement of Saturday’s Stater Bros. 300 Nationwide Series race and shortening Sprint Cup practice to 34 minutes.

The Nationwide race has been rescheduled for Sunday, to be run after the conclusion of the Auto Club 500 Sprint Cup race, which has a scheduled start time of 4 p.m. ET.

Jeff Burton will start the Stater Bros. 300 from the pole because the No. 29 Chevrolet he drives won the owners’ championship for Richard Childress Racing last season, with Burton and Scott Wimmer splitting seat time in the car.

Drivers in the Cup series will start Sunday’s Auto Club 500 with the benefit only of the one rain-shortened practice session. All on-track activity, including qualifying for the Cup race and the Craftsman Truck Series San Bernardino 200, were washed out by rain on Friday.

Kyle Busch, who won the Truck Series race before the rain began to fall Saturday afternoon, says he could have used more practice time in preparation for Sunday’s Cup race.

“Our car wasn’t as good as I would have wanted it to be,” he said after the rain-shortened practice. “But it’s a long 500-mile race, and we’ve just got to keep on top of it and make changes as we need to and try to make this thing better all day long — and not get too frustrated with it and come up through the field.”

Hoping to become the first driver to win a race in each of NASCAR’s top three series on the same weekend, Busch will start 22nd in the Auto Club 500, having inherited the owner points earned by J.J. Yeley in Joe Gibbs Racing’s No. 18 car last year. Busch signed with Gibbs for the 2008 season after driving for Hendrick Motorsports in 2007.

Last November, Busch won the Craftsman Truck and Nationwide Series events at Phoenix before finishing eighth in the Cup race on the same weekend. Last July at Daytona International Speedway, he won the Nationwide race and finished second by .005 seconds to Jamie McMurray in the Pepsi 400 when rain forced both races to be run on the same day.

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California CTS Results

By Reid Spencer
Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

FONTANA, Calif. (February 23, 2008) — Kyle Busch has come of age — literally.

At age 16, Busch was kicked out of Auto Club Speedway and banned from the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race there because the weekend also featured a CART event sponsored by cigarette maker Marlboro and federal law precluded persons under age 18 from participating in events sponsored by tobacco companies.

On Saturday, Busch returned to the two-mile track as a 22-year-old veteran and pulled away from Todd Bodine in the final 10 laps of the San Bernardino County 200 to claim his seventh win in the truck series and his first in a Toyota. Busch led 51 laps in opening a 20-point lead over Bodine, who won the season opener last week at Daytona International Speedway but entered the race tied in the points standings with Busch and Johnny Benson because of a 25-point penalty incurred for a bed panel height infraction at Daytona.

“This means the most to me than anything,” said Busch, who finished 1.415 seconds ahead of Bodine. “In this race in 2001, I was kicked out of the racetrack. I probably could have sat on the pole and won the race that day.”

hnny Benson ran third in Saturday’s race, the first leg of an unprecedented CTS/Nationwide Series doubleheader. Terry Cook was fourth,followed by 2007 series champion Ron Hornaday Jr., Ted Musgrave, Travis Kvapil, Mike Skinner, Colin Braun and Phillip McGilton.

Bodine held the lead from lap 58 to lap 75, before a cloud cover caused his No. 30 Toyota to tighten up. Busch reassumed the point on lap 76 and led the final 11 laps of the 100-lap event after the field completed a cycle of green-flag pit stops “That’s exactly what happened,” Bodine said of the cloud that changed the handling on his truck. “I told (crew chief) Mike (Hillman Sr.) that the clouds came over and gave him (Busch) a little more grip.”

Bodine’s crew put on scuffed tires during his last pit stop, but that left truck with a loose condition that prevented him from overtaking Busch, Bodine said.

Skinner and Hornaday, the two dominant CTS drivers in 2007, both recovered from early difficulty. Skinner’s engine had a miss from the outset, but his team discovered a loose sparkplug wire on a Lap 6 pit stop and corrected the problem. A slow pit stop on lap 15 dropped Hornaday from the top 10, but by the time the field restarted on lap 49 after a caution for debris in Turn 3, Hornaday was running fourth. Another slow stop on his final trip to the pits, however, dropped Hornaday to fifth at the finish.

Notes: After struggling early, Jon Wood had worked his way back into the top 10 before breaking a rear-end gear during his lap 46 pit stop. He finished 32nd. . . Six weeks after Busch was kicked out of Auto Club Speedway in 2001, NASCAR imposed an age limit of 18 in all three of its top series, rendering Busch ineligible to compete in the 2002 season.

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