DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Perennial championship contender Kyle Busch said Wednesday during Daytona 500 Media Day that he and Joe Gibbs Racing officials are close to signing a contract extension.
“We’re in discussions right now,” Busch said. “We’re talking. It’s all been agreed to. It’s just a matter of putting a pen to the paper, so. We’re all good.”
Busch has 51 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series wins — second most among active drivers, behind only Jimmie Johnson — and 47 of those came in the No. 18 Toyota. He won the series championship in 2015 and is coming off one of the best years of his career. “Rowdy” won eight races in 2018 and made the Championship 4, finishing fourth in the final standings.
Busch’s current deal is believed to run through 2019. He and team owner Joe Gibbs announced in November 2015 that the two sides had signed a multi-year agreement.
Since that announcement alone, Busch has 17 wins and 53 top-five finishes in the ensuing three seasons.
He enters 2019 nearing 200 total wins across all three NASCAR national series — his 194 victories include the 51 Cup wins, 92 in the NASCAR Xfinity Series and 51 in the Gander Outdoors Truck Series.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.— Denny Hamlin readily acknowledges that when he shows up at Daytona International Speedway, he is a race favorite. He’s earned that distinction as a former Daytona 500 winner.
But this year a victory in the sport’s biggest race wouldn’t only be of historical significance but put an end to the longest winless streak in the 38-year old Virginian’s decorated Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series career. Last year he did not win a race for the first time since his 2006 rookie season.
“I feel pretty optimistic,’’ Hamlin said, sitting down to meet with reporters during the annual Daytona 500 Media Day. “I would say about the same as usual to be honest with you.
“I thought The Clash (last Sunday afternoon) kind of gave us an indication that we were able to kind of get up front even starting last. We got up front in a timely manner. No surprises really from that, so there’s no reason to think otherwise that we can’t win.”
This year, his showing in the Feb. 17 Daytona 500 (2:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusNASCAR Radio) will be especially important and, frankly, sentimental as he has dedicated his season to one of his biggest supporters, J.D. Gibbs, 49, who passed away last month after a long illness.
Gibbs, son of Joe Gibbs Racing founder Joe Gibbs, died on Jan. 11 from a degenerative neurological disease. J.D. was not only president of the NASCAR championship organization but he was the person who signed Hamlin to the team in 2005. It was a relationship established on talent but built on equal parts friendship and business. And this week, Hamlin still looked pained and sentimental thinking of the loss.
“It’ll be super important (to do well),’’ Hamlin said. “Everyone knows how important he was for me and my career and everything he did for us, so certainly having success on track will be crucial for that. Now that I pledged $111 for every lap that we lead, it’s going to be important for me to get up front and get up front often.”
Up front is a reasonable and likely place to find Hamlin at Daytona International Speedway. His work in the Daytona 500 – specifically – and Speedweeks in general, is undoubtedly a career highlight reel. He is the 2016 Daytona 500 winner, earned three victories in the Duel at Daytona qualifying races and three wins in the Advance Auto Parts Clash – including his first career Cup-level victory as a rookie in the 2006 Clash non-points race.
His 267 laps led in the Daytona 500 is most in this year’s field as are his 407 total laps led at Daytona International Speedway (also including the summer’s Coke Zero 400).
Hamlin is also among the sport’s most elite company winning both the Clash and the Daytona 500 in the same year – something that’s occurred only six times total.
This season Hamlin’s No. 11 FedEx Toyota will have a new crew chief in Chris Gabehart, who moved up from JGR’s NASCAR Xfinity Series stable. Interestingly, as much pressure as there is in the sport’s most celebrated race, Hamlin thinks the Daytona 500 restrictor plate race may well be the best kind of transition for a new crew chief.
“I think it’s actually a good race to start with a new crew chief because you’re not really talking about handling that much,’’ Hamlin said. “It’s a good one to just kind of get your feet wet on the communication side of things. What his lingo is on the radio versus mine, so I think it’s actually a good start to the year.
“Even for the drivers that are in new situations, to start a year on a superspeedway where you’re not really having to fix the car much. It’s kind of more about the driver and how he strategically makes his way through the pack.”
A win or even a good showing in the 500 would certainly continue the kind of positive energy Hamlin showed in the end of last year.
He finished a season-best runner-up twice (at Dover and Martinsville) during the 10-race 2018 Playoffs to end the season and finished 11th in the overall standings. He earned four pole positions and sat on pole for the season finale at Homestead, Fla.
It’s all eyes ahead.
“I’m looking forward to this one more than looking back on the last one simply because there’s just nothing I can change from this past year,’’ Hamlin said. “I couldn’t help the bad breaks that we had or the things that went wrong. All you can do is just figure out how can that not happen again.
“With a new crew chief, you’re obviously also working on what do we need to do to communicate better? What do you need from me and what do I need from you and that’s the most important thing that we really worked on.
“You always feel like you have something to prove, but certainly this year in particular, I’m very fired up to go out there and win. Not one race, not two races, not even three – just like multiple races and show that we are a contender each and every week just like I know that we are.
“You can always talk about the ones that got away last year, but that was last year. So what, now what? We’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do to change the narrative of our team that we’re on the decline.”
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Everyone knows the friendship between Ryan Blaney and Chase Elliott off the race track.
But how about the one between Blaney and Chase’s father, Bill Elliott?
Blaney got to know the Hall of Fame driver a little better during a four-hour, music-less drive with the two Elliotts to Colorado last season between races in Texas and Phoenix.
“Bill doesn’t listen to the radio, so it’s dead silent,” Blaney recalled Wednesday at Daytona 500 Media Day. “And I had to sit in the front seat with him and Chase was sleeping in the back. And so you make conversation.”
Despite the lack of Miss May I coming through the speakers, Blaney treasured the chat, citing his strong relationship with the elder Elliott.
“Bill’s been great to me, Bill’s a great guy,” Blaney said. “Being able to talk to someone like that, who I have so much respect for, was really special to me.”
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Ryan Preece has added his name to a very short list.
The number of modified champions who have ventured into NASCAR’s premier series and enjoyed even a modicum of success can be expressed in single digits.
Jimmy Spencer won two races in what is now the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, a feat later equaled by Steve Park. Mike McLaughlin won six times in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, and Jeff Fuller claimed one victory in that series, but neither ascended to full-time Cup rides.
So the odds are long against Preece, the 2013 NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour champion who is running for Sunoco Rookie of the Year honors in the Cup series this year.
Then again, the odds against Preece have always been long, and the 28-year-old from Berlin, Conn., has shown a willingness to gamble for the highest possible stakes—his own future.
It’s an oft-told story. In 2017, Preece took all the money he could scrape together and bought two races in a top-of-the-line Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. He finished second in his first outing at New Hampshire. In his second start in JGR equipment, he won at Iowa.
Those performances were the springboard that first earned him additional rides in the Xfinity Series and ultimately propelled him to his current Cup deal with JTG Daugherty Racing.
Now all Preece has to do is change the narrative established by his modified predecessors.
“The gamble paid off,” Preece said. “I’m not saying it would for everybody. I didn’t know if it would. My phone wasn’t blowing off the hook at first. I want people to know that. It could be a life-changing gamble either way.”
Even though Preece has landed at JTG Daugherty, he is maintaining a strong connection to his modified roots. On Tuesday night, he won a 35-lap modified feature at New Smyrna Speedway, just down the road from Daytona Beach. And he has sought counsel from Park, who in 2000 took the checkered flag at Watkins Glen, won two poles and posted 13 top 10s in his best Cup season.
Park’s best piece of advice to the rookie?
“There’s a lot of stuff I could say, but I don’t think I could say it right here,” Preece said on Wednesday’s media day to preview the Daytona 500 (Sunday, 2:30 p.m. ET on FOX). “I would say, ‘Don’t hold back. Don’t just drive the car. Don’t just drive through what it’s doing. Constantly tell them very in detail what the car’s doing, because they’re not going to make it better if you don’t.’
“Coming from modifieds, if it was close, it was like, ‘Hey, guys, it’s good. Don’t worry about it. I’ll wheel it.’ That gets you pretty far, but that’s not going to win you races — not at this level.”
Preece is replacing AJ Allmendinger in the No. 47 Chevrolet this year. Allmendinger’s best performance on an intermediate speedway last year came in the Monster Energy All-Star Race at Charlotte, where NASCAR introduced a higher-downforce, lower-horsepower competition package for that event only.
The 2019 rules package incorporates the principles that produced close racing at Charlotte. That’s a source of optimism for Preece. So is the recent organizational test at Las Vegas.
“Single-car speed really won’t mean much, but if you have single-car speed, you just need to translate it to the draft,” Preece said. “That was something we had, and now we just need to fine-tune and be meticulous about getting it to go from that single-car to the draft.”
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Kyle Larson says his previous interactions with new teammate Kurt Busch had been limited to isolated chit-chat, maybe an off-hand conversation when they qualified on the same row and shared a parade vehicle during pre-race ceremonies.
But based on conversations with others, Larson says he’s prepped for some solid chemistry building.
“Everybody I’ve talked to that’s been a teammate with him in the past has always said that as crazy as he is, he’s a great teammate,” Larson says, referring to Busch’s sometimes brash persona. “He’s been good to work with so far and he’s got a ton of knowledge and experience. I’ve enjoyed it and looking forward to getting to other race tracks outside of Daytona so we can learn more off of each other.”
Larson, 26, is entering his sixth full season driving Chip Ganassi’s No. 42 Chevrolet. It will be his first campaign paired with Busch, the 2004 premier series champion who replaces Jamie McMurray in the No. 1 Chevrolet.
On the surface, Larson’s laid-back personality might seem to be on an opposite spectrum with the bolder Busch, who has mellowed over time after bursting onto the NASCAR scene with a gung-ho approach. But Larson says he’s less concerned about how they’ll mesh, focusing instead on soaking in the wealth of knowledge that comes with Busch’s experience and success.
“I think personality-wise, I think I’ll stay the same. I think work-ethic-wise, I think he can push you to be a little bit better, so I’m excited just in that aspect of thing,” Larson said. “… We’re around a lot of different people all the time and I feel like I do a good job of staying grounded and being who I am. I don’t think I’m going to have any episodes like he’s had in the past now that he’s my teammate, but like I said, it’s not often you get to work with a past champion as closely as I’m going to get to this year. I’m very excited about that opportunity.”
Editor’s note: This week in advance of the Daytona 500, NASCAR.com will look back at some memorable race victories and detail the odds the winning driver had, and which driver in the 2019 field most correlates.
Twenty years after Dale Earnhardt’s memorable 1998 Daytona victory — which we ranked first in our all-time race rankings — Austin Dillon lurked in the No. 3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet on a late restart.
With one career Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series win to his credit, Dillon entered the 60th running of the Daytona 500 last year with 40-1 odds to win the “Great American Race.”
He trailed leader Aric Almirola when the white flag dropped, but got an incredible run on the outside on the final lap. When Almirola moved to block, Dillon didn’t lift, sending Almirola into the wall and pushing his No. 3 into the lead — and soon thereafter, Victory Lane.
Following the prerequisite victory slide and celebration in the Daytona infield, of course.
The most comparable driver in this year’s field is …
William Byron, No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet
Sean Gardner | Getty Images
Yes, entering Daytona Speedweeks, Hendrick Motorsports driver William Byron was pegged at the same 40-1 odds as Dillon was last year. His makeup is the same, too.
Hendrick Motorsports has an unrivaled plate program, especially in qualifying — that much is evidenced by Byron winning the organization’s fifth consecutive Daytona 500 pole.
Hendrick drivers will start 1-2-3-4 in this year’s Daytona 500 (2:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), so the Monster Energy Series sophomore will have plenty of help around him — at least in the early going.
NEW SMYRNA, Fla. — Two of short-track racing’s top talents took the checkered flag on Monday night at New Smyrna Speedway.
Five-time NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour champion Doug Coby and established Super Late Model star Bubba Pollard picked up victories in their respective divisions on the fourth night of racing as part of the 53rd annual World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing at New Smyrna Speedway.
Coby, who hadn’t seen New Smyrna except once, back in 2014, dominated the 50-lap Tour Type Modified feature. He qualified second, and with an invert of zero, Coby lined up to the outside of the front row for the drop of the green flag. The Milford, Connecticut, driver took the advantage from polesitter Patrick Emerling in the first turn of the race and never looked back.
The veteran proved to be a quick study of the Florida half-mile. He is hoping to use the five nights of Modified racing to get a step up on some of his Whelen Modified Tour competitors in hopes to return to championship form.
“We have tried a lot that we wouldn’t have been able to try if we hadn’t come here. That’s flat-out why we came,” Coby said. “The wins are nice, but really, this is still a test session. The car is in one piece, we can go celebrate, but, we have to come back tomorrow.”
Emerling finished second on the track, holding off a hard-charging defending World Series champion Matt Hirschman, who opened his week on the podium in his attempt to repeat. However, Emerling didn’t make it through post-race technical inspection, moving Hirschman to second.
In the 35-lap Super Late Model battle, Bubba Pollard started from the top spot after winning the pole award, but it wasn’t long before he was trailing. The Georgia native found himself following behind Dan Fredrickson in the opening laps — in fact — all the way until the 29th circuit.
When Fredrickson slid out of the groove in turn three, Pollard took advantage and never looked back from that moment. In some ways, it was an emotional Victory Lane for the entire team, since the car Pollard drove to victory wasn’t his own.
Pollard is driving the No. 11 for David Rogers — a New Smyrna local driver who was unable to compete this week due to a medical procedure.
“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m even driving it,” Pollard said. “It’s a legendary car. David Rogers and his group, they are great people. This is for him and all of the guys that work hard.”
Results: World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing Night 4:
Tour Type Modifieds: 1. Doug Coby; 2. Matt Hirschman; 3. Jimmy Blewett; 4. Anthony Nocella; 5. Chuck Hossfeld; 6. Timmy Solomito; 7. Mike Willis Jr.; 8. Jeremy Gerstner; 9. Jeff Goodale; 10. Calvin Carroll; 11. Amy Catalano; 12. Dillon Steuer; 13. Ryan Preece; 14. Jeff Gallup; 15. Nikki Carroll; 16. Jimmy Zacharias; 17. Andy Jankowiak; 18. Tommy Catalano; 19. Tyler Rypkema; 20. Dean Rypkema; 21. Al Amarino; 22. Chris Risdale; 23. Tom Tonn
Super Late Models: 1. Bubba Pollard; 2. Brad May; 3. Gabe Sommers; 4. Colin Garrett; 5. Sam Mayer; 6. Derek Kraus; 7. Logan Seavey; 8. Dan Fredrickson; 9. Anthony Sergi; 10. Harold Crooms; 11. Derek Griffith; 12. Travis Braden; 13. Spencer Davis; 14. Carson Kvapil; 15. Nolan Pope; 16. Alex Labbe; 17. Brent Strelka; 18. Clay Greenfield; 19. Jeff Holmgren Jr.; 20. Stephen Weaver Jr.; 21. Christian Rose; 22. Chuck Tuck; 23. Patrick Thomas; 24. Trey Bayne; 25. Gus Dean; 26. Ryan Moore; 27. Jett Noland; 28. Jared Irvan
Whether it’s behind the steering wheel or on foot, seven-time Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson is always looking for a race to run — this time it’s the 2019 Boston Marathon.
After competing in the Daytona Half Marathon on Sunday morning prior to Daytona 500 Busch Pole Qualifying and his victory in the Advance Auto Parts Clash, Johnson announced he will compete in the 26.2-mile race on April 15.
1:33 for the 🏁. That one hurt, the wind was crazy on the way out to the beach. Tailwind on the way back was nice. Next up: drivers meeting and #Daytona500 qualifying pic.twitter.com/GGAjJFYE1d
The race takes place just two days after the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway on April 13, which allows Johnson a full day of recovery following the Saturday night event.
An avid runner and fitness advocate, Johnson has become a significant influence on many others throughout the garage to pay more attention to their physical health. After competing in multiple half marathons, this new endeavor will be his first full marathon, one he’s had on his radar for quite some time after the 2013 bombing that prompted the “Boston Strong” movement.
“Watching the Boston Marathon the year of the bombing (in 2013), something clicked about me wanting to run that race, and once the bombing happened, I wanted to be part of ‘Boston Strong,’ ” Johnson told Dave Burns during the debut of the Splash and Go segment for NBCSports.com.
Johnson finished 14th place overall in the 13.1-mile race in Daytona and won his age group with a time of 1 hour and 33 minutes.
The trophy collection at Kyle Busch Motorsports is as varied as it is impressive. Winning nearly 200 NASCAR national series events, plus fielding a successful NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series team, tends to make a pack rat out of even the most clutter-averse people.
Winning has made Kyle Busch a gatherer — a hoarder even. But there’s organization to the whole caboodle. The shelves at the 77,000-square-foot team headquarters in Mooresville, N.C., are stacked with hardware, with most trophies grouped by track — providing visitors a virtual tour of the stock-car racing circuit with every venue represented. When you request a video shoot with the trophy case as a backdrop, Busch’s handlers can reply, “Which one?”
Down the hallway are the mini Miles the Monster keepsakes from Dover, the triangle-mounted eagles from Pocono, the cowboy hats from Texas. Bristol Motor Speedway, where Busch can claim 21 victories in all three series, has its own special case and then some, decorated with gleaming, silver loving cups and ceremonial brooms from his pair of tripleheader sweeps there. So many wins are chronicled here, the trophies spill over into the gift shop.
In the main case, some recent reorganizing is evident. Square in the middle of a curated selection of Monster Energy Series memorabilia is a sizable gap, signifying what seems to be the only missing piece from the 33-year-old driver’s portfolio.
It’s a reserved parking spot for Harley J.
This space is reserved for the Daytona 500 Harley J Earl trophy.
“What’s missing?” Busch says in the splashy promo reel that dropped last weekend, announcing his arrival at Daytona Speedweeks and his firm goals for his first win — and first Harley J. Earl trophy — in the Daytona 500 (Sunday, 2:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN). Busch is an agonizing 0-for-unlucky-13 in the Great American Race, a goal that started with childhood dreams and that has been blocked by a variety of hurdles.
“Overall, when I made my first start in the Daytona 500 in ’05, I was like, ‘Man, how cool would it be for a rookie to come out here — like, a true rookie — to be able to win this thing?’, ” Busch says. “I dreamed of winning that race, thinking I could win that race since I’ve been in it. It’s just never happened.”
If it does happen Sunday, that last trophy — the most prestigious in NASCAR — would pull the whole room together.
Daytona remembrances
Busch estimates it was late in his elementary school years when he first saw Daytona International Speedway. His mother took him and brother Kurt for the Daytona USA experience, which provided a trip through the infield and a tour of the rest of the facilities.
“You went all the way down to the grandstands for the road course in Turn 1,” Busch says, “and then you looked all the way back to Turns 3 and 4 and it was like, ‘Holy (expletive), this place in humongous.’ ”
His more frequent return trips to the 2.5-mile speed center have merited less of the wide-eyed fascination associated with youth, but with no less focus. Busch’s passion for the Daytona high banks grew as he watched Hendrick Motorsports — a team he would later drive for — go 1-2-3 in the 500 in 1997. The following year, he shared in the collective joy of watching Dale Earnhardt’s long-anticipated breakthrough in Daytona’s main event after 19 years of fruitless attempts.
Busch’s history with the 500 has its own share of close calls and heartbreak. In 2008, he led the most laps and was locked in a draft with then-teammate Tony Stewart when Ryan Newman whizzed by on the final lap, buoyed by a push from Kurt Busch, Newman’s Team Penske teammate.
Busch returned to lead the most laps the following year, but wound up 41st after a late-race stack-up. He wouldn’t come that close again for another seven years, but would encounter the largest trauma of his racing career in between, fatefully at Daytona.
Busch crashed during an Xfinity Series race on Feb. 21, 2015, his Toyota nosing into a frontstretch barrier and causing multiple, severe leg injuries. He missed the first 11 races of the season, the first of which was the next day’s Daytona 500, held just blocks away from the hospital where he recovered from surgery to repair a compound fracture. Truck Series veteran Matt Crafton drove Busch’s No. 18 to 18th place in the only Monster Energy Series start of his career.
Brian Lawdermilk | Getty Images
Nine months later, Busch would become a premier series champion for the first time, farther south in Florida at Homestead-Miami Speedway. But the anguish of being outside the car for NASCAR’s most esteemed race still lingered.
“(Wife) Samantha and I, I cried at the start of the race because I wasn’t in it,” Busch says. “It was not a great experience or one that you’d wish on anybody. In the end, the way ’15 ended up, I’m kind of glad I went through it, in all retrospect. I think that life happens in funny ways for funny reasons. I don’t know.”
He returned to Daytona the following year as a champion, but again left with regrets, helplessly watching teammate Denny Hamlin inch by Martin Truex Jr. in front of him as he claimed third. Hamlin’s clinching maneuver came nearly a full lap from the checkers as he exited a Joe Gibbs Racing train formation to break Kevin Harvick’s momentum on the high side.
“And I thought,” Busch says, snapping his fingers to mimic the split-second nature of his decision process, “just the corner before he went by me, I needed to get out of line and do that move and didn’t. It ended up being the move that won the race. I kick myself every time that I didn’t do that.”
An elusive prize
Prominent drivers with NASCAR Hall of Fame jackets never wore the Daytona 500 crown — Terry Labonte, Mark Martin and Rusty Wallace among them. Still others waited the bulk of their careers to finally taste a 500 victory.
Busch isn’t quite to Dale Earnhardt’s “20 years of trying, 20 years of frustration” refrain just yet, but his pathway has been similarly tortuous. And when asked to pinpoint the reason, Busch says no single explanation jumps out.
“I’d say it’s multiple things, but in all reality, I’d say it’s bad luck,” Busch says. “Two years in a row, these last two years we’ve had flat tires that have just taken us out of the running. Nothing that we’ve done, I don’t think, so that’s been a bit demoralizing overall. But at some of the other events, we’ve run OK and been in contention.”
Hamlin, his teammate, had his own waiting time outside of Daytona’s Victory Lane, but finally claimed his lone 500 win with a numerologist’s dream sequence in 2016. He drove car No. 11 from the 11th starting position in his 11th Daytona 500 try.
Like Busch, Hamlin cites the factors of luck against fate. But he also suggests that Busch’s repeat performances in contention at the historic track should eventually equal kismet.
Sean Gardner | Getty Images
“You’d like to think that it’s a matter of time,” Hamlin says. “Look how long it took Dale Earnhardt to do it, and he dominated. He was way better than either one of us at that race track — by a mile. It’s just a hard race to win because of so many things that can go wrong. You have to have everything happen perfectly, you have to miss the wrecks, you need a little bit of luck in there, but you just try to put yourself in those ideal situation. And sometimes Kyle was just not in the right, ideal situation, but a lot of the times, it was just bad luck.
“Looking back, I can think of a couple years, maybe, where he got in a crash that wasn’t his doing or maybe had a tire go in one of the years. But certainly, I think at his age, it’s probably a matter of time. He’s got a long time ahead of him. I think that he’s won those Shootouts before and all those races. He’s kind of had the same resume that I had before I’d won the Daytona 500. So certainly, he’s got everything in his favor to go out there and get it done, but sometimes he just hasn’t had that little bit of luck factor that you need to finish the deal off.”
That finicky nature of competing at the World Center of Racing has led to some love-hate sentiment for Busch, who enters Sunday’s 500 as a contender in a field flush with would-be winners. He’s prevailed in almost everything else here, winning qualifying races and the preliminary Clash, scoring a victory in the July 400-miler and claiming Daytona triumphs in the other two national series.
If a Daytona 500 win truly is a matter of time, Busch should have a special reverence for the event’s history and its ability to wash away years of heartache.
He’ll also have no guesswork when figuring out the proper place for the trophy.
“Really, I’ve loved the place,” Busch says. “For what that race track means in the history of our sport and what Daytona Beach means for the history of our sport, back from 1949, it’s what our sport was built on.”
Kyle Busch sits at an impressive 194 NASCAR national-series victories entering the 2019 season. That’s within driving distance of another historic all-time wins milestone, the amazing 200 set nearly 35 years ago by Richard Petty.
Though close in proximity to Petty’s mark — which was established entirely in NASCAR’s top series — Busch’s numbers are divided among three different stock-car circuits. And that’s a fact that has also divided many history-minded NASCAR observers trying to draw comparisons between the two accomplishments.
For his part, Busch isn’t trying to make his own correlations. He’s simply enjoying the discussion.
“That was just a number I threw out there, even though it was the same number. It was just out of thin air,” Busch said, referencing a casual first mention of the 200-win goal after notching the 50th of his career back in 2009. “But what’s crazy is I’m getting close to it. I didn’t think I’d get close to it, especially this early. I mean, I might have a chance to do it this year.
“I don’t try to equalize or compare apples to apples on myself and Richard. That’s not what this debate is about. I think it’s cool that there’s a debate. I think it’s cool that there’s a dinner-table-type talk around this.”
That debate has been spirited, with vocal arguments from each side. Advocates for Petty contend that 200 wins in NASCAR’s top division would trump Busch’s tally, which has roughly three-quarters of its win total from the Xfinity and Gander Outdoors Truck Series ranks. Busch backers retort that his wins came against arguably stiffer competition, with Petty racking up dozens of trophies against thin fields in 100-mile races before NASCAR’s modern era.
Dissecting stats across different eras leads to multiple conclusions and feeds an even larger discussion about who is the all-time No. 1 driver in NASCAR history. Busch doesn’t delve into the latter debate, which he says is impossible to solve.
“People want to figure out who’s the greatest of all time, and in my opinion — in any sport — there’s no greatest of all time,” Busch says. “I think you can have a top five, but it’s going to be really, really hard to decipher who’s the No. 1 of the top five in any sport. You look at Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Steph Curry — guys like that. Look, Michael’s my favorite just because he’s my favorite of the three, but I look at LeBron and what he’s been able to do and the different teams he’s been able to do it with and how he’s led them to championship games eight years in a row. You can’t beat that, you know what I mean? But he doesn’t have more championships than Michael Jordan, and Michael Jordan doesn’t have the most.
“That’s what I’m getting at. Like Tom Brady and (Peyton) Manning, Drew Brees, (Joe) Montana — that’s how I interpret all those things. That’s the comparison I’m trying to build. Do I want to be known as the greatest of all time? No. Do I want to be known as one of the top five? Sure.”
Those unending debates all fuel the weighing of Busch’s legacy in the sport, a legacy he’s still actively building as a 33-year-old driver in his prime. As a one-time champion with 51 (and counting) premier-series wins, his NASCAR Hall of Fame credentials are secure. But he’s still aiming to add a Daytona 500 victory to that portfolio, a goal that he’s redoubled this season.
Adding to that list of accomplishments is what still drives him, and it’s what prompts the question of when he might consider exiting the cockpit and enjoying life after competition. He cites the example of Jeff Gordon, who quit full-time driving on his own terms in 2015, going out by battling Busch for that season’s title.
“What’s left on the list? It’s like, well, I’ve about checked everything off. It’s just now about adding to it,” Busch said of his legacy. “A one-time champion is great, but two is better. A one-time Daytona 500 winner would be awesome. That would check off the rest of the boxes. It would complete the deal. But then winning more of them. People ask, what’s going to keep you going? Well, it’s winning more of them. I’ll be done when I feel like I’m not able to perform and be at the top of my game anymore.”
