Kansas Speedway gives Kurt Busch a chance to make a case for NASCAR’s Hall of Fame
When NASCAR’s Kurt Busch took the checkered flag at Las Vegas last month, he realized the historical and personal significance of the moment.
The win not only was Busch’s first Cup victory in 21 starts at his hometown track, it qualified him for the Round of 8 in NASCAR’s playoffs. It also advanced him closer to reaching the Championship 4 race in Phoenix.
And it also moved him one step closer to the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
The win was the 32nd of Busch’s Cup career, tying Hall of Famer Dale Jarrett for 26th on the sport’s all-time win list. To win a second career Cup title next month, he would have to win at least one of the three races in the Round of 8 and most likely the finale at Phoenix.
That would give Busch a second championship to go with his previous title in 2004. No driver, not Richard Petty, not Dale Earnhardt, have won Cup championships 16 years apart.
“If we can get there, to Phoenix, that would be huge,” said Busch, who drives the No. 1 Monster Energy Chevrolet. ”It would give me an opportunity to win the championship for Chip Ganassi Racing … Those things and Hall of Fame talk will all handle itself after my racing career is done. I just keep plugging away and adapting.”
After solving the riddle of Las Vegas, Busch now has a bigger goose egg to fry, and that’s Kansas Speedway, where the Round of 8 begins with the Hollywood Casino 400 at 1:30 p.m. Sunday (NBC).
Busch, Ryan Newman and Kevin Harvick are the only drivers to have started all 29 Cup races at the track that opened in 2001. But Busch is the only one of the three who has yet to win at Kansas.
And he knows it.
“Kansas is not one of my best tracks,” he said, “but it is a 1.5-mile, where we have won twice at Chip Ganassi Racing (Kentucky in 2019, Las Vegas in 2020). I’ve got a couple of second- place finishes. One of them was a set-up that Harvick happily agreed to run when we were with Furniture Row and RCR together.
“And that’s what it takes. It takes that camaraderie and balance of teamwork and also pushing the envelope. Kansas is one of those very aero-dependent tracks. And so, you’ve got to be on top of your game with the aero side of it to win there.”
Busch, 42, won his first Cup championship with Roush Racing in the inaugural year of NASCAR’s postseason playoffs, then known as The Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. Since then, he’s had a somewhat volatile career, moving to Team Penske for six seasons before parting company in 2012. He spent two years each with two modestly-funded teams before joining Stewart-Haas Racing in 2015 and landing with Chip Ganassi in 2019.
Through it all, he’s won at least one Cup race for the past seven seasons, including the 2017 Daytona 500 (another entry for a Hall of Fame resume), and reached the playoffs 14 times in his career.
As an elder statesman in the Cup garage, Busch seems to have found true equanimity with Ganassi and Chevrolet and will be mentoring Ross Chastain when he moves from the Xfinity Series into the No 42 car next season.
“The team camaraderie is a different element for me now,” he said. “I love to teach young engineers and young crew members how to evolve in this sport and to do it at a championship level. And so just being older and wiser, and still having that passion and that drive to adapt to the new technology and the new ways of winning, that’s something that my father instilled in me, that work ethic, from a young age.
“And with my wife, Ashley, she loves sports. She’s an athlete herself (as a professional polo player). And her support and her love has been a new direction for me these last five years.”
Busch also has rebuilt his relationship with younger brother Kyle, the reigning NASCAR Cup champion. Because of the pandemic, the Busch brothers, whose sibling rivalry often went beyond the racetrack, have shared aircraft to races this season and have reconnected on a family level.
“Our relationship has blossomed this year with being travel buddies and staying in a family bubble together and respecting the COVID process together,” Kurt said after beating Kyle to the checkered flag at Las Vegas.
“And just to share stories and get caught up with things that we never talked about before, and to have him be the first one to give me the congratulatory donut down the back straightaway, it was a flashback of Legend car racing when we were growing up as kids together, and old brother always wins.”