Kurt Busch makes his way through the turns during the 2012 running of the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway.
Photo – Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Driving for Team Penske in 2011, Kurt Busch led 76 of 110 laps and beat Jeff Gordon to the checkered flag by 2.685 seconds to win the 2011 Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway.

But that dominating drive was no more impressive than Busch’s third-place finish a year later in a car fielded by owner James Finch. Remarkably, the Las Vegas driver nailed down that podium finish with a broken track bar mount in his Chevrolet.

“The track bar mount kept getting worse and worse and worse,” Busch told the NASCAR Wire Service at a track-sponsored luncheon on Thursday in San Francisco. “I was trying to pass (eventual race winner Clint) Bowyer, but I felt something coming apart in the back end. I said to myself, ‘It’s going to look stupid if I move him out of the way, and then the part breaks. What good would that do?”

So Busch settled for third, but some of the insights he gained with respect to racing at Sonoma still hold true.

“The setup I had with Penske when we won in 2011, I remembered as much as I could and told the team, and they put it in the best that they could,” Busch said. “We qualified eighth, and that car just came alive, just like the Penske car did around lap 5, running better lap times than on stickers (new tires).

“That’s when you have good cars here. You run good from lap 5 to lap 20. That’s how you win at Sonoma.”