NEW YORK -- Oh, what Kyle Busch would give to be at a racetrack right about now.

Instead he's sitting in a director's chair and outfitted with an earpiece and microphone, answering questions by satellite from reporters gathered three time zones away at Phoenix International Raceway. They're the same questions he's been answering all day -- What are your chances in the Chase? What tracks are you worried about? Do you really hate Carl Edwards? -- and the cumulative effect is numbing. You can see the wear in the driver's eyes. And what happened to lunch? Either he missed it, or amid the Good Morning America shoot and the ESPN appearance and this big multimedia finale at the Hard Rock Café, he never had time to eat it. He's been subsisting all day on a bagel and a vanilla latte from Starbucks.

Granted, it's not exactly working in a coal mine. But for men who make their living going fast, the slow crawl that is NASCAR's annual Chase media day can be abject drudgery. All 12 of the drivers participating in the playoff were brought to Manhattan on Wednesday to smile for cameras and generate publicity in advance of the opener Sunday in New Hampshire. No one played a more prominent role than Busch, the series leader, whose non-stop obligations had him on the move from dawn to mid-afternoon. While he's clearly wrung out by the end of it Busch never complains, never grumbles. He's courteous and talkative every time a camera or recorder is turned on. Yet it's quite obvious that he's more comfortable going 200 mph than rolling through Midtown traffic at a crawl.

"It's all right," he says of the experience. "I've got better things to do. I'd probably be working on late model stuff, with my late model team, doing some things there or testing somewhere. Being at a racetrack."

Of course, some people are going to take that statement the wrong way, and view it as complaining when he's just giving an honest answer to a question posed to him. That's the thing about Kyle Busch -- almost everything he does gets taken the wrong way. Whether it's the look on his face when he exits his racecar or his role in the latest on-track altercation with Dale Earnhardt Jr., sure enough, somebody's ready to bash the kid for it. He's been painted as a villain because a certain segment of the NASCAR fan base doesn't like the way he looks, or the way he sounds, or the way he drives. Sometimes he plays along, needling fans or fellow drivers, or displaying a rather brusque exterior at the racetrack when focused with the job at hand.

“

Why worry about somebody else's life? I've got enough sh-- going on.

”

-- KYLE BUSCH

But take him out of the car and put him in a black Cadillac SUV, trade his firesuit for a pair of dress pants and a sport jacket, replace the maddening crowd with a NASCAR rep, a sponsor rep, and a lone reporter, and something interesting happens -- a picture of what might be the real Kyle Busch begins to emerge. And guess what? He's not a bad guy. Sure, he's made enemies, in the grandstand as well as the garage area. Though it's hard to find the "moral code" former car owner Jack Roush recently implied was lacking. Busch comes across as quiet, unassuming, and rather uncomplicated, a 23-year-old who's been so fixated on racing for so long that almost everything else fades to the periphery. Certainly, there's a dark side there. But he has to be pushed over to it.

And right now, it's Michael Waltrip doing the pushing. Busch still seethes over remarks he says the former Daytona 500 champion made on his weekly SPEED show last May, after Kyle and brother Kurt took each other out in the all-star exhibition. Although a transcript or video clip of the episode wasn't available, the comment allegedly concerns the way the Busch brothers were raised. To Kyle, mentioning the family was hitting below the belt. His paternal grandmother, who reads and watches all things NASCAR, was particularly incensed. Even the thought of it still stings. So when Clint Bowyer called Waltrip "the worst driver in NASCAR" over the radio after a wreck at Bristol last month, the points leader wasn't exactly sympathetic.

"His dumb ass saying what he said after Clint went off on him, 'My mom doesn't need to hear that, my kids don't need to hear that,' and stuff like that," Busch says, as the Escalade rolls from one television appearance to another. "I'm like, 'Well, why don't you think about what you're saying before you say it on that damn Monday night show when all the rest of our parents and grandparents are listening too?' They don't want to hear that stuff about us. It could have very easily been, 'Well, they got into each other, they were racing hard, they were going for a million bucks.' But no. He had to bring up parents and our upbringing. He doesn't know sh-- about how we were raised. I've never said anything to him. I've thought about it, but then I thought, where is that going to get me?"

There it is, the angry, petulant, perhaps too-honest Busch that leaves race fans shaking their fists and firing off inflammatory e-mails. But during the course of a long, tiring morning and afternoon, it's the only time it surfaces. The rest of the day brings the Kyle who enjoys hanging out with friends Denny Hamlin and David Stremme, the Kyle who graduated high school a year early so he could pursue a career in racing, the Kyle who wonders what the monthly electric bill is for businesses in neon-lit Times Square. That Busch is a low-key but still competitive guy, as evidenced by the way he and Jeff Gordon go right for the Wii in the green room at Good Morning America. Unfortunately, it's loaded with "Endless Ocean," a slow scuba-diving game, and not exactly the way racecar drivers get their fix. "What kind of game is this? Let's look at the fish?" Gordon asks, his voice still hoarse from sleep. The two laugh and joke like the Hendrick Motorsports teammates they once were.

"I'm not a bad guy out in public and stuff," says Busch, who even attended the Hendrick Christmas party after last season ended, fulfilling one of his final duties in a contract that expired Dec. 31. "To me, I have my passions and what I thrive on, which is the racing stuff. I have a lot of friends who work on the team, we go out and do things together and things like that. We'll go out and mess around. I'm real laid back and easy going. I'll get high-strung on some stuff that really matters to me. Like if my late model team is doing something I'm not proud of or spending too much money, I'll get on their ass."

No need for that Wednesday. Waiting out an appearance by Rascal Flatts and Taylor Swift -- the latter a blonde, wispy country music starlet that Busch makes a point of introducing himself to -- they settle for pinball, and Gordon wins. "Finally beat you in something this year," says Gordon, who enters the Chase with zero race victories to Busch's eight. Busch gets in a zinger of his own during the GMA shoot, where he's interviewed along with Gordon, Kevin Harvick and Dale Earnhardt Jr. in front of a racecar painted in Sprint colors and parked at the curb in Times Square. One of the show's hosts asks him, how do you keep from getting squirrelly on the racetrack? Simple, Busch says. "You don't back into the 88 car."

Autostock

"The evil M&M" continues to catch flak after the hero of Junior Nation was spun out at Richmond in May. Despite its affinity for Earnhardt, the Nation considers Busch "No. 1."

Edwards and Earnhardt

Busch's greatest nemesis isn't a driver, but a fan base. Contrary to popular belief, he's respected by most of his peers inside the Cup Series garage, where reputations are made and broken almost exclusively by one thing -- performance on the racetrack. He's even cordial with Carl Edwards, with whom he was embroiled in a headline-grabbing post-race spat at Bristol. Tuesday they appeared in-studio together during Tony Stewart's Sirius talk show, even sharing a car ride over. No hard feelings were evident. "We're BFF. We even talked about wearing the same outfit," joked Busch, who like Edwards sported a gray jacket and matching slacks for his media rounds the next day.

To the horde that is Junior Nation, though, Kyle Busch is an unrivaled public enemy No. 1. Busch and Earnhardt have tangled at least four times on the racetrack during the past two seasons, and when up against the sport's most popular driver, Busch has no shot when it comes to public opinion -- even if not all the incidents are his fault. There was the wreck last September in Kansas, when Earnhardt got into Busch and effectively ended his Chase hopes. There was another incident at Homestead, where the two cars collided when Earnhardt cut through the grass to get from an access road onto pit lane. There was spring Richmond this season, when Busch tried to push his way past Earnhardt with three laps remaining, and both vehicles went sideways. And there was Sunday at Richmond, when Earnhardt spun Busch.

Running through all of it is the undercurrent of what happened during the winter, when Earnhardt essentially replaced Busch at Hendrick Motorsports. Judging from their lack of personal interaction Wednesday -- when the two were together not only for Good Morning America, but also a taping of Live With Regis and Kelly -- it's safe to assume that Earnhardt and Busch are not exactly friends. But there's no open hostility between them, either. Just silence. Busch's issue isn't necessarily with Earnhardt, but with his fan following. Junior Nation blames the points leader for every incident, deserved or not, in the process fueling much of the anti-Kyle sentiment found in the grandstands.

"I don't have a problem with Junior. Yeah, we've had our run-ins, and what Junior Nation fails to realize right now, and probably Dale Jr., is that I'm still two [wrecks] behind," Busch says. "Kansas and Homestead. People are going to say it was my fault, and I wrecked him at Homestead. But he went off through the grass. I don't know what the rule was, if you were supposed to come back on the track or not. At that given point in time, I thought if you got out into the grass, you were supposed to go back to the racetrack. When he came to pit road, I was shocked. And that's when we ran into each other. I ran into him, but I never even saw him."

Sure, he's a tall, young guy with a pot-stirring smart-aleck side to him, but away from the racetrack, Busch looks like anything but the villain he's been made out to be. "I get the sense that some people relish it, enjoy it, even think it's cool," Jeff Burton says of playing the bad guy. But it's easy to see that Busch isn't completely comfortable with the part. He's too naturally quiet and reserved for the label to accurately fit. But he goes along anyway, understanding that a little drama helps the sport, and for right now, at least, this is the role that he's been destined to play. It's a subject Busch can't avoid, even during a call-in appearance on Dan Patrick's syndicated radio program.

"I kind of got it thrown on me," he tells the former ESPN anchor. "I came into this sport and was booed my first ever race. To me it's kind of been with me since the beginning, since me getting into the NASCAR world. I started making progress. I was making ground. I was probably at a 60/40 cheers to boos ratio, and then first Richmond come along, and that's where everything sort of hit the fan. And you know what happens when it hits the fan."

What happens is, it gets ugly. "You get told you're No. 1 a lot," Busch says. During the course of one day in New York, it's very clear that Busch has more fans than he gets credit for -- a woman who wants to show him a photo on a digital camera during a fan forum at the Hard Rock, middle-aged women who ask for autographs and pictures while he's waiting for the SUV to pick him up from the Regis and Kelly shoot, folks shouting "Kyle Busch!" as he walks down a Midtown avenue. There are plenty of people who like his iconoclastic role, who like the fact that he tweaks Junior Nation, who like his headstrong style behind the wheel. But then there are the detractors, many of them wearing No. 88 T-shirts, who grumble derogatory comments and refer to him as "the evil M&M" under their breath.

By now, he's become used to it. "How do you not let it get to you? Because I'm at where I'm at, and they're at where they're at," Busch says. "And I like what I do, and they worry about my life more than theirs. It's kind of like why I don't know any celebrity gossip. Why worry about somebody else's life? I've got enough sh-- going on."

And for the time being, that entails a media roundtable with eight writers representing northeast publications with a combined circulation of 8 million readers, just the kind of attention NASCAR tries to generate out of this one-day extravaganza. On the subject of Earnhardt, he's given ample opportunity to take a shot. Does he really see the No. 88, with only one win this season, as competition for the title?

Busch plays it down the middle. "Everybody's competition," he says. "Junior's going to be just as tough as any of the other guys will be, I believe. You never know, because of this car and what it entails and how well they've run with it this year. I just feel like he's lost a little something here lately."

He's not incorrect -- after recording top-10s in 11 of the season's first 15 events, Earnhardt has just two since. But of course, Busch is going to catch heat for it on message boards, and he knows it. Big deal. Being hustled from the SUV and into the Regis and Kelly green room, onlookers wanting autographs shout from the sidewalk: "Take care of your fans!" Busch barely misses a beat. "I don't have any fans," he retorts. "Just wait, Dale Earnhardt Jr. will be here in a while."

He turns, a wide, devilish smile on his face. Once again, he's poked the beast. All right, maybe he does enjoy playing the villain every once in a while.

Mike Stobe/Getty Images

Given the choice -- driving 200 mph or trying to catch scoops of ice cream with a cone -- Busch gladly will stick with his day job.

Born to race

Busch leans back in his seat in the rear of the Escalade, trying to relax a little as he heads from the print roundtable to the finale at the Hard Rock. It's early afternoon, and the neon lights of Times Square are already blinking. "What do you think the power bill is for this place?" he wonders out loud, sounding very much like the 23-year-old he is. "It's like Vegas. Vegas' [bill] is probably bigger, though. All those lights on the inside."

Busch would know. He grew up in Las Vegas, that glittering oasis in the Nevada desert, where he and his older brother Kurt both learned to race. He was so good at such a young age that his father Tom wanted to move him up a division, from Legends cars to modifieds. One problem: Busch was only 15 at the time, and drivers had to be 16 to make the jump. So he altered his birth certificate to make himself appear a year older.

"I've got a system," he says with a wily grin, like the college upperclassman who can get a freshman a fake ID. "I could do it again. I know exactly how I did it. My mom didn't like the idea, but she was OK with it. My dad and I were all about it. So we did it. I had been in Legends cars for two years, and my dad was like, 'That's enough, we need to move you to something else.' You had to race modifieds at 15 to get to late models at 16. Since I did good at modifieds, the guy let me run his late model. We ran modifieds for half a season before we got caught."

But he had made enough of an impression in that half a season that he was able to land a full-time late model ride in the American Speed Association. He was still in high school at the time, and there was no question which came first -- his mother worked for the Clark County School District, so blowing off classes was not an option. Since ASA often qualified on Friday and raced on Saturday, Busch would often arrive at Durango High early on Monday mornings to make up the tests and class work that racing had forced him to miss. He resolved the problem by graduating a year early, and at 17 moved to his ASA team's home base of Hicksville, Ohio, to begin racing full-time.

He was so good at 16 that Jack Roush put him in a Craftsman Truck, at least until NASCAR implemented a minimum age of 18. No birth certificate finagling could get him around that. He broke into the Cup circuit at 19, won his first race at 20, and at 23 is the favorite for the championship. Busch may follow the Denver Broncos, he may enjoy a little wakeboarding on Lake Norman, but nothing else rivals his passion for racing. He runs -- and wins -- in all three of NASCAR's national divisions whenever he gets the opportunity. He left last year's awards banquet right after the ceremony to go compete in the Snowball Derby, a super late model event in Pensacola, Fla. Driving identically-prepared Camrys, he beat NHRA champ Tony Schumacher in a pair of exhibition races to open the new dragstrip at Lowe's Motor Speedway. After this NASCAR season ends, he'll fly to Japan to take a spin in a Toyota Formula One car.

On Saturday of last week's storm-postponed event at Richmond, Busch wanted to fly to Newport, Tenn., to compete in a late model race, but his Joe Gibbs Racing team nixed the deal. "J.D. didn't want me to go run it," he says, referring to Gibbs team president J.D. Gibbs. "He said, 'If it's really important to you, you can go.' But that's like saying, how well are you going to respect my authority? I'm learning. I'm learning."

He's dipped his toe in the ownership game, fielding a late model car for fellow Las Vegas native Alex Haase in the PASS South series. "I started it for myself to race a little bit, and we ran like eight races and won two of them. This year I turned it into a full-time team with Alex driving it," Busch says. "They've won two out of 10. It's probably going to turn into a business. It was something fun for me to do."

Could it lead to something bigger, like a Craftsman Truck or Nationwide team? "If the opportunity presented itself like Stewart, then hell yeah," said Busch, referring to his current teammate, who was given a 50 percent interest in the team now known at Haas CNC Racing. "But to start it on my own? I don't know."

A long, wearying day is finally drawing to an end. Busch has gone from Good Morning America to the Dan Patrick Show to Live With Regis and Kelly, where the drivers don zip-up coveralls and try to catch tossed scoops of vanilla ice cream in a cone. Then it's off a Midtown production studio for what's supposed to be a live television interview with an ESPN program, but the satellite link isn't working properly and Busch does a phone-in instead. It's all just a sample of what it might be like for Busch should he win the championship, when he'd return to New York in December for a weeklong schedule of appearances and photo ops.

His teammate Stewart has been there twice, and doesn't think there's anything Busch wouldn't be able to handle. "There was nothing asked that was any different from what we did any other week," said Stewart, who won titles in 2002 and '05. "... It's not a position. You still show up at the racetrack on the weekends, and you're a racecar driver again. I don't know that there's really a position."

Busch will find out himself in December. If he wins it all? "It's just going to be off the hook," he says. He likes his chances. Sure, Edwards and Jimmie Johnson are surging, but Busch still enters the Chase with a 30-point advantage over the field. The biggest stumbling block might be Sunday's opener in New Hampshire, where Busch started 27th and finished 25th in the spring. This time, his No. 18 team is bringing a different car.

"I think we can do it," he says, when asked if he can finish the job. "It kind of works back and forth. At the beginning of the summer, I had like a 270-point advantage, and Junior cut like 50 of those points off, and then we gained 50 back. Carl gained some, and then we gained some back, and he's gained like four or five on us in the past few races. So yeah, it's kind of slimmed down, but I think there's going be some areas where we give, and I think there are going to be some areas where we can take."

Right now, the only thing he wants to take is a nap. After another session with print journalists, the satellite appearance in Phoenix, a photo with the other 11 Chase drivers and a stint with television reporters -- but still no lunch -- the day-ending blitz finally wraps up. He signs some autographs on the way to the Escalade, which ferries him back to the chic, luxury hotel NASCAR is using as its base of operations. That night, he'll attend chairman Brian France's annual dinner with the Chase drivers. The next day, he'll take a flight to New Hampshire for the looming race weekend. But first, he wants to catch a few Z's. After all, playing the villain can be exhausting work.