A broken drive shaft handed Kyle Busch his first DNF of the season Sunday at Dover International Speedway.
Busch, who was running in third, fell off the pace on Lap 272 and went to the garage after losing his drive shaft. Busch’s problems brought out a caution.
Busch had been complaining of a vibration in his No. 18 Toyota for much of the race but placed in the top 10 in each of the first two stages. He wound up finishing 35th.
“It just kept getting worse and worse the more the day was going,” Busch told Fox Sports 1. “Especially after restarts, it was really, really bad. I was just trying to bide it out, see if we could make it to the end. At first I thought it was an engine problem, but that wasn’t the case. It was certainly the drive train, something else. This isn’t a very popular of a failure for us. We have an idea, I already know what was wrong, but we have to go back to the shop and diagnosis it and find out why it was wrong. “
Busch won at Dover last fall. The DNF is his fifth in the spring race at the 1-mile track since 2012.
“The pace was just so fast, the speeds were so high that it just was vibrating so hard that, you know, you could barely stand it through your body down the straightaways getting into the corners, you know?” Busch said. “I couldn’t feel anything through the corner through my butt with the car just feeling tight, feeling loose and all that. Just visually and through the steering wheel, so you’ve got to have everything kind of right in order to be fast here – especially at Dover – and I thought we were going to be alright, but just not today.”