Miller Lite Dodge driver Kurt Busch and crew chief Roy McCauley will be back together operating in full force for this weekend’s Dickies 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.

“It’s been about the toughest two weeks I’ve ever experienced,” offered McCauley, coming off a suspension handed down by NASCAR officials under a penalty for a shock absorber deemed “improper” after qualifying for the race three weeks ago at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. “I’ve really learned that I don’t make a good absentee crew chief, armchair quarterback, or whatever you want to call it.

“Our team is blessed with great personnel such as Matt Gimbel, who can come in when needed and really get the job done,” McCauley said of the 34-year-old Northampton. Pa., native who helped lead Busch’s Penske Truck Leasing Dodge Grand National team to two wins this year and filled in for McCauley during the first Phoenix race due to medical reasons. “Matt performed extremely well under fire and I personally want to call him out for a job well done.

“Even with me not being able to physically be there on site for the last couple of weeks, we have maintained a great continuous line of communication between our driver, team engineer Derek Stamets, Matt and myself,” McCauley said. “Thank goodness for cell phones, computers and modern technology.

“I’m just itching to get back to the track,” McCauley said late Monday afternoon, as he prepared for a trip to Kentucky Speedway for a day of testing on Tuesday. “I’ve been pretty impressed with what I’ve seen over the last two weeks, even though the numbers may not look all that positive.

“We won another pole at Martinsville and had a top-five car at worst in the race, before getting crashed by a lapped car. Just looking at the figures for the Atlanta race last weekend really doesn’t tell the whole story there, I feel.

“Kurt was really tight during the practices last Saturday, so we came up with a race setup that would loosen him up,” McCauley explained. “With the race starting so late and running into the darkness, it was pretty much a guessing game when it came right down to it. The bottom line is that we just loosened the car up too much. We started the race so loose that we wound up facing a deficit that we couldn’t bounce back from.

“I was tuned in for the entire race and monitoring our lap times each and every lap. We got the two laps down fairly early in the race and Kurt exercised great patience through that period before the car’s handling really started coming around,” McCauley continued. “That’s one of the biggest signs of progress I’ve seen.

“Kurt drove like a true champion in the Atlanta race. When the car was so loose, he was able to drive it to its limit and get all he could out of it, instead of crossing that line and winding up in the wall. He was tolerant and helped the team figure out what changes we needed to make. It paid off at the end. I know that a 14th-place finish isn’t anything to really brag about, but the fact is that we had a strong car, a top-10 car, at the end of the race. We were running continuous top-10 lap times for the last third of the race.”

According to McCauley, Tuesday’s testing at Kentucky was being done to, “focus on some specific components for 2007. But, of course, it being an intermediate-size track, we certainly hope that the track time will help us when we get back out to Texas this weekend.”

Busch, McCauley and crew will be racing their PRS-081 Miller Lite Dodge Charger at Texas. The car has not been raced this season, but the team did utilize it during testing at the Homestead-Miami Speedway on Oct. 16-17.

In Busch’s seven career Texas Cup races, he has yet to win, but has recorded five top-10 finishes. His fourth in the April 2001 race rates as his best finish to date. His seventhplace start during last April’s visit was the closest to the front he has ever started a T.M.S. Cup race.

Busch’s Texas racing resume also includes events in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and in IROC. He started fifth and finished sixth in the June 2000 truck race and started fourth and finished third in the truck race there in October of the same year. He finished 11th in both of his IROC Series races on the demanding 1.5-mile track.

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