1on1: Steve Addington

Kyle Busch and the No. 18 Toyota team fielded by Joe Gibbs Racing ended the 26-race regular season on top of the Sprint Cup world, having won eight races to earn the No. 1 seed heading into the 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup championship.

Then the Chase started, and Busch's title hopes rapidly went up in smoke. Engine trouble, parts failures and some untimely wrecks led to dismal finishes in the first two races at New Hampshire and Dover, where the No. 18 car limped to finishes of 34th and 43rd, respectively, if not so respectably.

Crew chief Steve Addington talked about the unexpected freefall from first to 12th in the Chase standings even before further problems -- this time related to the fuel system in the No. 18 car -- led to yet another disappointing finish of 28th in Sunday's race at Kansas Speedway.

Steve Addington

By the Numbers

0	Number of Sprint Cup wins earned as crew chief prior to this season
4	Number of seasons spent as crew chief in Sprint Cup
5	Highest finish earned as Nationwide Series crew chief (Mike Bliss, 2004)
8	Number of Sprint Cup wins this season
15	Number of seasons spent as crew chief in Nationwide Series
21	Number of weeks the No. 18 team spent atop the standings in Sprint Cup this season

Q: How do you explain what has happened to the No. 18 team so far during the Chase?

Addington: We've just had some parts failures. That's something that we know no one in our organization wants to happen. [Engine builder] Mark Cronquist and those guys will continue to work on it and I'm sure we'll get things turned around.

Q: Are you just sick about how this has happened at precisely the worst time?

Addington: It hurts. We've had a lot of good racing luck this year. Getting Kyle in here this year brought this race team around to where it needs to be, and now we've just got to keep digging. If we can win some races and some of the other guys in front of us have trouble like we've been having, you never know what might happen. In these races, it can happen to anybody. I think we've pretty much proven that.

Q: Kyle said after Dover that he pretty much had given up on winning the championship. What were your thoughts after hearing that he said that?

Addington: We look at the points that we've lost, and it could happen to them. We're just going to go out and keep trying to win races, and if any of those guys stumble, we could be right back in the thing. We're down but we're not dead yet.

Q: But does it get you and the rest of the team down when your driver says something like that?

Addington: Look, he has a right to be down -- just because of the season he's had and now how the bad races come all in a row. But if you look at Jimmie Johnson in '06, he had some bad races at the start of the Chase and came back to win the championship. So we don't look at it as anything other than him just being a little frustrated at the time, which he has a right to be. You can't let things like that get to you.

Q: How was he when he arrived for the Charlotte test two days after that happened at Dover?

Addington: He came in with a great attitude. After we got looking at the engine stuff and got back up in the trailer, he said, 'Hey, I apologize for that. There was nothing you could do about it. Let's just go out and get back to doing what we've been doing all year long.' (Continued)