Fatherhood, Kansas Speedway have been good to Kyle Busch
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — The flirtations with success that have plagued Kyle Busch all season would have eaten away at him earlier in his NASCAR career, when he was less secure regarding not only his driving ability but himself.
He would stew and rage and carry the angst with him — week to week, track to track.
But a lot has happened in a few short years: He sustained serious injuries during a 2015 crash at Daytona International Speedway, returned that season to win his first Cup Series championship and along the way watched his wife, Samantha, give birth to a baby boy after they spent years struggling to conceive.
“You put things into a different perspective,” Samantha Busch explained, “so a bad day at the track might have stuck with you till Tuesday, but now you go back to the bus and you have Brexton and you’re so blissfully unaware of everything going on, and he’s still so happy. And (being a father) makes things easier for Kyle when things don’t go the right way.”
Samantha paused, then added: “But on the track, he’s still Kyle. He’s always going for the win.”
He thought he had it last weekend at Talladega Superspeedway. Busch led a race-high 48 laps and thought he was positioned to win for the first time this season, only for everything to unravel in overtime. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. roared past him on the last lap, and Jamie McMurray managed to get by as well, relegating Busch to third.
It was another solid finish. It was also another frustrating one.
“We just weren’t in the right place at the right time, I guess. I thought we were,” Busch said Thursday afternoon at Kansas Speedway, where he won the track’s spring race last year. “We legitimately had a shot to win five races this year, in my mind. We’ve been in a position or had a shot to win five different times this year, and we just haven’t been able to close the deal. That’s the most frustrating thing for us. We haven’t been able to get to victory lane.”
Busch lamented his misfortune while standing, appropriately enough, in victory lane, where he was helping other Toyota drivers pack boxes to distribute to women’s shelters on Mother’s Day.
The run of misfortune began at the Daytona 500, where Busch led 18 laps before a tire went down and he crashed out of the race. An on-track dustup turned into an off-track fight with Joey Logano in Las Vegas; then an untimely crash by Logano at Phoenix International Raceway spoiled Busch’s late lead.
In Martinsville, Busch led 274 laps before he cast blame on a bad set of tires for costing him a chance. And in Richmond, Busch was running second to Logano when he tried to follow the leader onto pit road during a late caution but committed too late and was penalized.
“I’m looking forward to having fast cars throughout races, not having pit-road speeding penalties or issues that knock us back and we have to fight our way back from those. We did that at Richmond,” he said. “We came back through the field, we got up front and we had another penalty that put us in the back. It’s just all-around (trouble).”
Now, let’s be clear: Busch’s well-known temper has been evident after each mishap, usually in the shape of comments to TV networks and snappy responses to questions from reporters.
But the tension dissipates a little quicker these days once Busch gets to spend time with his wife and coddle his bouncing boy. All the stress and anxiety of Joe Gibbs Racing’s failure to win this season evaporates for a short period of time while Busch revels in a bit of fatherhood.
“I caught (Brexton) and Kyle yesterday practicing how to say, ‘Happy Mama’s Day,’” Samantha Busch said, taking a break from packing boxes, “and I almost started crying.”
There was a time in his career when Busch would have assumed his misfortune would continue at Kansas Speedway. It seemed every start there ended in a wreck. But much like his outlook on everything else has changed, so has his opinion of the track.
His first victory of the 2016 Cup Series schedule merely capped a string of solid finishes, and he followed it up with a fifth-place run during the fall race in Kansas during the playoffs.
Busch is optimistic everything finally will come together here this weekend, too.
“We seem to have gotten a setup or a hold of this place. We’ve had some really strong runs here,” he said. “Hopefully we don’t screw that up this time around.”