Oh baby! New dad Kyle Busch to defend at Kansas Speedway

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Kyle Busch stalked away from his battered car in controversial fashion last weekend at Darlington, his once-promising run in NASCAR’s throwback race having ended in frustration after Brad Keselowski’s blown front tire sent him spinning.

It didn’t take long for Busch’s week to get a whole lot better.

Two days later, Busch and his wife, Samantha, welcomed their baby daughter to the world after years spent dealing with infertility. Lennix Key was born by surrogate, making their soon-to-be 7-year-old son Brexton a big brother, and putting everything else in proper perspective — as if Busch needed any help in that respect.

“There’s a personal life and a racing life, a personal life and career, however you want to interpret that,” Busch explained Saturday at Kansas Speedway, “and I try to segregate those and separate those we much as I can.”

His rollercoaster week could certainly end on a high Sunday given his performance at Kansas lately.

What was once a mile-anda-half of heartbreak, where Busch was just as likely to crash in practice as reach the finish line in one piece, has become one of his favorite places. He has 11 top-10 finishes and two wins in his last 14 trips to Kansas, and he’s the defending winner of last year’s regular-season race just west of downtown Kansas City.

Hard to believe Busch once crashed out of three straight races there.

“Even the last few times before we won there we had some really strong runs,” Busch said.

“We finished in the top five, I think, five races in a row, and we have also been in the top 10 a lot, so it’s a place where we’ve really picked it up, and now we have two wins there. We seemed to have gotten a setup or ahold of that place.”

Bell on the pole

Christopher Bell qualified on the pole for Sunday’s race at Kansas Speedway, topping the time set by Tyler Reddick earlier in the session and grabbing his third pole of the NASCAR Cup Series season for Joe Gibbs Racing.

Bell turned a lap of 179.575 mph Saturday in the first showcase of the Next Gen car at the mile-anda-half oval west of downtown Kansas City. That was enough to beat Reddick, who went 178.855 mph for Richard Childress Racing, and add to the poles that Bell won at Las Vegas and Talladega.