Just the other day, it seems, there was this lanky rookie with big ears and a professorial countenance who, out of nowhere, would pester veterans from NASCAR’s biggest track, Talladega, to its smallest, Martinsville, and come up just short at the finishes.
You wondered just who he and the team owner who discovered him, Jack Roush, thought he was.
Now you know.
Watching Kurt Busch grow from kid into man has been something like following a quarterback from college into the NFL. But Busch has done all his maturing in the big league. His voice has deepened, his face broadened, his neck thickened. His speech is more authoritative.
He also has become, as veteran Dale Jarrett predicted early this season, the man to beat at every Winston Cup race.
By consensus of his peers, he drives as hard as they’ve ever seen anyone push a car, including Dale Earnhardt. And some of them go all the way back to the little bulldog, Cale Yarborough.
“Each week,” Busch said, “there are new reasons why I pressure the car as hard as I do.”
He adjusts as the race goes on, whatever the track, whatever the behavior of his car or his competitors.
Texas Motor Speedway, site of Sunday’s Samsung/Radio Shack 500, has changed since last year. Recent testing indicates the racing will be about 5 m.p.h. slower, meaning closer racing, because of the aging of the pavement.
Whatever. Texas the rocket ride or Texas the scramble, Busch adapts.
He is 24.
Ever since Jeff Gordon won the Winston Cup at age 24 in 1995, forever freezing Earnhardt’s total of championships at seven and essentially ending Earnhardt’s iron reign at the pinnacle–and therefore beginning the new wave that dominates NASCAR today–every motor-racing writer in the nation has been pressured by his/her editors to find “the next Jeff Gordon.”
Busch is the closest thing yet. Because he has the same birthday as Gordon, Aug. 4 (Busch is seven years younger), the calendar itself would be the scorecard, and the comparisons would be in full force, race to race, day to day.
Except that–mercifully for him–Busch forever will remain a chronological lap down to Gordon and immune to precisely chronological comparisons. He hit the big time a year later in life than Gordon did.
Team owner Rick Hendrick launched Gordon full-time into the Cup fray in 1993, the year Gordon turned 22. Jack Roush waited until the year Busch turned 23 (2001).
So if Busch wins his first championship this year (he’s second to teammate Matt Kenseth in the standings), he will do it after turning 25 and so cannot match Gordon on the calendar.
But compare them according to seasons of experience in Cup–rookie, sophomore and now Busch is in his third–and Busch looks Gordonesque or better.
Neither won as a rookie. Indeed, the entire Roush team slumped terribly the year Busch broke in. Still he finished third at Talladega in the spring of `01, and “we almost won the fall Martinsville race and the fall Rockingham race my rookie year. We just came up short,” he recalled.
Gordon won twice in his second season. Busch won four times last year, including three of the last five races. Roush placed savvy, seasoned crew chief Jimmy Fennig with Busch and “it was just a slap upside the head of, wow, this is how our car’s supposed to handle,” Busch said.
In Gordon’s third year, he broke loose for seven wins and the championship. Busch has only one win in the first six races this year–at Bristol last Sunday–but finished second in three of the first five. If not for the failure of his power steering in the last 10 laps at Darlington on March 16, he feels certain he would have won going away, and there would have been no fender-banging, .002 of a second loss to Ricky Craven.
Count back 11 races–six this year, and the last five of ’02–and Busch has won four times, finished second or better seven times, third or better eight times, and come in sixth or higher nine times.
That’s championship rhythm. And seven or more wins this year are within his reach.
Unlike the young Gordon, Busch hasn’t developed a legion of boo-birds. Fans like his pluck, and especially warmed to his class act when he said in the aftermath of the Darlington shootout with Craven, “That was the coolest finish I’ve ever seen, and I’m just happy I could be a part of it.”
If he’s not exactly the next Jeff Gordon, he may have us all wondering, a few years hence, about the next Kurt Busch.
Is this Roush’s year?
Roush cars have won three of the six Cup races at Texas. Busch and rookie teammate Greg Biffle are the only two Roush drivers who haven’t won there. Jeff Burton won the inaugural event in 1997, Mark Martin won in `98 and Kenseth won last year.
The 1-2 status of Kenseth and Busch atop the standings, the Roush team’s two wins (Kenseth’s at Las Vegas and Busch’s at Bristol) and the Roush team’s history at Texas have even Roush himself lowering the tone of his usual grousing about perceived disadvantages his Fords might face under NASCAR rules for bodywork.
Though he can’t quite let go yet, claiming the Ford body configuration is five years behind the 2003 racing versions of the Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix and Dodge Intrepid, Roush admits “maybe my anxiety was for nothing. We’ll see.”
In this year of uniform body styles among makes, virtually every team with every make has settled in and stopped complaining. Roush has been the only overt grumbler this season.
But maybe he finally has learned, after years of what he considers bad treatment by NASCAR, that being a perennial gadfly doesn’t exactly endear you to officials who sometimes make judgment calls.
Last season he fought NASCAR to the bitter end, appealing a 25-point penalty against Martin for an unapproved spring while Martin was in contention for the championship. Last week, Roush quickly capitulated to NASCAR’s suspension for two months of John Monsam, Roush truck-racing crew chief, for using an illegal spring last Sunday at Bakersfield, Calif.
A less-combative Roush might clear some obstacles to a Busch or Kenseth championship–which would be Roush’s first Winston Cup after 16 seasons of struggling against the wind.
Making a go of it: Kerry Earnhardt, who hasn’t had nearly the breaks of younger half-brother Dale Jr., tried to crack into Winston Cup by qualifying Friday at TMS.
Driving for a Busch team co-owned by former All-Pro quarterback Terry Bradshaw, Earnhardt tried several times last year to qualify for Cup races, “and each time we tried, we got rained out” in qualifying, he said. “It was a pretty big joke around the garage.”
Friday, he failed to qualify again, finishing 44th.
On pit road: Confidential to Texans who’ve been told for years their track is the best in the nation by Bruton Smith, chairman of Speedway Motorsports Inc., which built the $250 million facility: Last week, Smith was pressed to name his favorite track among the six he owns. He partly covered his mouth with a hand and whispered, “Bristol.” . . . Kyle Petty, badly shaken up in a crash last week at Bristol but with no serious injuries according to a CT scan, is expected to drive at Texas. … Tony Stewart, after his first DNF of the season last week, dropped to third in the standings but is in much better shape than he was a year ago, when he was 12th in the points but still went on win the championship.
