Kyle Busch: ‘I’m Sorry, That’s Just Who I Am’

For all the talk about Kyle Busch changing and growing and maturing over the years, from Old Kyle to New Kyle to Family Man Kyle, the 2015 Cup champ never seems to go too long without doing something that pisses everyone off.

And you know what? As it turns out, that might not ever change.

That’s the theory Busch floated after winning the pole position Friday at Dover — five days after his much-publicized mic toss following a second-place finish in the Coca-Cola 600.

“Different people show their emotions in different ways,” he said. “Unfortunately for me, mine has never been very gracious — and I don’t know that it ever will be. I’m kind of learning that as the days go on. When my son (Brexton) is 2 years old, I see where it came from — it’s genetic.

“I’m sorry, that’s just who I am. That’s what I was given. If there’s anyone to blame, it’s probably the guy upstairs. I mean, I can probably get better and go to training and classes and everything else, but I don’t know. It is the way it is.”

Busch made the case those flashes of emotion don’t represent who he really is as a person, though — which is why sponsors, family and friends keep supporting him even in bad times. Look no further than Samantha Busch’s Instagram post this week to see another way he’s perceived.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to be blessed to be in the opportunity I’m in,” the driver said. “I’ve got great sponsors and partners that are with me, and they’ve stuck with me through a lot worse than what happened this week. And that’s through relationships.

“Those people that are close to me understand me and know me and know who I am outside the racetrack as a person and a friend, and that’s why I’m able to continue to have the relationships and the sponsorships that I do.”

As for why he was so upset at Charlotte, Busch said the time between his televised FOX Sports interview right after the race and when he arrived at the media center gave him time to stew over the missed opportunity.

For one thing, Busch said, he thought he was in position to win the race after passing Martin Truex Jr. and seeing Jimmie Johnson run out of gas (he believed Austin Dillon would also run out).

Then there was the fact a Coke 600 win slipped away — which would have given him three of the four NASCAR “majors” — as well as a Charlotte sweep that would have given him his first points win at his favorite track.

“There were a lot of things on the line that meant a lot to me and would have been special to me, but I guess I should care less about those sort of things and not show that sort of emotion,” he said.

Monte Dutton column: Turns Out The Thief Was Dillon

Esteemed racing writer and author Monte Dutton is covering the Coca-Cola 600 for this website. Here’s his final post from the weekend.

By Monte Dutton

When the wrong guy wins, it’s interesting. It’s not exciting. Wrong guy, interesting, beats right guy, boring. It’s similar to the way a flush beats a straight.

What if it’s the wrong guy, once removed? All the more fun for the wee hours.

Austin Dillon won the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Sunday night and Monday morning. He drove No. 3. It’s been a while for No. 3. Talladega in 2000. Cat named Earnhardt.

“It hasn’t sunk in, by no means,” Dillon said.

Later, he added, “To be quite honest with you, we had an argument, full-on, face-to-face, with my grandfather, this week, about the performance of the car.”

Cat named Childress. Richard Childress. Won six championships (out of seven) with the cat named Earnhardt. He’s got a pair of grandsons who like to go fast. One never went faster.

“We’re not down,” Childress said. “We’ve got everything we need to win.”

“We did our job,” Dillon said. “We had a chance to win, and we did what it took to do so. The 600 is a lengthy race, and you can’t afford mistakes. We didn’t make them.”

Martin Truex Jr. dominated the race. He finished third.

“Two out of the past three (600s), we lost it on (fuel) mileage,” said Truex, who was gracious.

Jimmie Johnson was the chief suspect in the impending theft. What he wound up stealing was 17th place, citing first gas and then lack thereof.

Dillon? Dillon? Where’d he come from? The far side of Johnson, that’s where.

It appeared as if the thief in the night with enough gas in the getaway car was Johnson. Johnson’s crew chief is Chad Knaus, Super Genius. For once, Knaus was Wile E. Coyote, not James Bond. Johnson’s Chevy crashed into a canyon floor because his Acme parachute was an anvil.

Okay, Johnson’s Chevy ran out of fuel. Dillon’s didn’t. Who knew Dillon, the Roadrunner, was lurking in the shadows, waiting to go beep-beep?

Truex was supposed to be the Roadrunner. He wasn’t supposed to lose. The Roadrunner is a cartoon. It’s not supposed to be complex. The Coca-Cola 600 wasn’t a whodunit. It was a who-won-it. Truex led 233 of the 400 laps. Last year he led 392 laps. He won that one.

If watching the wrong guy win strikes your fancy, the Coca-Cola 600 was the race for you.

Kyle Busch was so overjoyed to finish second that he threw a tantrum in the media center. After basically daring anyone there to give him an opportunity to bite off their head, he slinked away to a nearby swamp to feed on lizards.

Six words he spat out. “I’m not surprised about anything. Congratulations.”

Then there was a crashing sound.

This was the most valuable race in the regular season. The race drivers were like truckers. They got mileage (especially Dillon). The race had four segments, not three, which, in turn, meant it awarded three sets of bonus points, not two. It’s a step in evolution. Before 2004, all races were created equal. Then playoff races became gold. Now the Coca-Cola 600 is silver, but only by a little.

The night’s first and almost only excitement occurred on the 20th lap, when apparently something approximating a manhole cover, or, more likely, a gong, clanged out from under Jeffrey Earnhardt’s Chevrolet and very nearly brought another, driven by Chase Elliott, to a stop. Brad Keselowski’s Ford struck Elliott’s Chevy, and it wasn’t a tap. One day Elliott may drive a tank, but a stock car can’t withstand such fierce impact.

Later the track went wet for one hour, 39 minutes, 56 seconds.

All those Air Titans were scarcely needed. Truex mopped the track with the rest of the field.

Into all lives, some rain must fall. For the Coke 600, though, it wasn’t in the budget. The thunder rolled, and the lightning struck. Ladies and gentlemen, there is lightning in the area! Just being the longest stock car race in the world wasn’t enough. God was in a whimsical mood.

DraftKings Fantasy NASCAR Picks: Coca-Cola 600

I’m playing DraftKings this season and will be posting my picks here each week. Disclosure: If you want to play and sign up using this link, DraftKings will give my website a commission. Disclosure No. 2: I might be America’s worst daily fantasy player.

Last race’s results: No race last week.

Season results: $23 wagered, $7 won in nine contests.

This week’s contest: $3 Beginner Slingshot contest.

Coke 600 picks:

— Martin Truex Jr. ($10,700). I have no expectations he can repeat last year’s performance — where he led the most miles in NASCAR history — but he often seems to find the front on 1.5-mile tracks. Maybe he can lead a bunch of laps again; if so, I want to capitalize on his hammer potential.

— Kyle Larson ($10,100). He didn’t make it through tech inspection in time to qualify, so Larson will start 39th. Take the position differential he’s sure to get, even if everyone else has him on their teams, too.

— Jamie McMurray ($8,400). McMurray was fastest in 10-lap average for final practice and starts 11th. That’s a pretty good value for a driver who could get a top-five, and you know those Chip Ganassi cars will be strong all race.

Austin Dillon ($7,600). He now has a new crew chief, so maybe that will mark a fresh start for the No. 3 team. But Dillon also starts 22nd and had the 12th-fastest 10-lap average in final practice, offering a good chance to move up during the race.

— Ricky Stenhouse Jr. ($7,500). I really wanted to pick Kasey Kahne here, but I didn’t have enough money (I was $400 short). So I’ll just take a chance and ride with Stenhouse and the Roush resurgence, although he wasn’t overly impressive in final practice (19th-fastest single lap, 16th-fastest 10-lap average) and starts 13th.

— Regan Smith ($5,600). An excellent value play here with Aric Almirola’s substitute. He’s cheaper than JJ Yeley and Matt DiBenedetto, but you could easily get a top-20 finish out of Smith (who starts 25th). The downside: The No. 43 car didn’t look very good in practice (second-slowest of the 25 cars who tried 10-lap runs in final practice).

Monte Dutton column: In the end, it’s not the kids’ fault

Longtime NASCAR writer and author Monte Dutton is covering the Coca-Cola 600 for JeffGluck.com this weekend. Below is his first post.

By Monte Dutton

Passion. That’s what NASCAR has to regain.

It cannot restore its glory by appealing to people with but a passing knowledge of what is going on. It must instill passion, and with allowances for the crack work of TV producers, that kind of storm doesn’t crop up in a living room with a six-pack of beer and a pound of nachos.

Quite often, these days, it takes at least a 12.

Kevin Harvick won the pole for Sunday night’s Coca-Cola 600. Whoop-de-doo. It’s not me talking, but, rather, the fans who weren’t here. At this point in the history of NASCAR, the prevailing view is that time trials aren’t worth watching anymore. Some cars don’t even make it through inspection. The format has been infused with tasty elements that TV reportedly enjoys.

On the way up Interstate highways 26 and 85, I thought about a similar drive back in 1986. I was about where I am now in the journalism racket, writing local sports for the Clinton Chronicle and doing morning sports at WPCC-AM 1410.

It was before both the rise and the fall of NASCAR and me. Like Lefty in the country song, now I’m growing old.

Charlotte Motor Speedway promoted back in those days. Even at the lowly Clinton Chronicle, a promotional packet arrived containing inexpensive novelty items and a fistful of tickets that weren’t going to sell anyway.

Lest you believe they were buying the media, the following year, after Dale Earnhardt and Bill Elliott tangled in The Winston, a box arrived containing one sliver of Wrangler denim and one empty, crushed can of Coors. At the time, crushed cans of Coors were not uncommon in my life.

The tickets were for Pole Day. I couldn’t go to the race, partly because of a full slate of local sports but also because I couldn’t afford to pay my way in. I called up a friend – I spent half the drive up today trying to remember who it was – and said, “Hey, I got some tickets to pole qualifying at Charlotte. Wanna go?”

“Hell, yes,” he said, because, back in those days, folks like me and him were willing to do things like drive over two hours to the other side of Charlotte, where we watched individual race cars drive extremely fast one at a time. A lot of young people said “hell, yes” about racing in those days.

There may have been beer involved, but best I know, beer is still involved today.

Thank God I went. If I hadn’t, I’d have never known the name of the only driver in NASCAR I’d pay to see qualify, even though I didn’t.

Tim By God Richmond.

He wrestled that red Chevrolet like he was running on Folger’s Coffee instead of sticking it over the fenders. In all those years, and all those long rides, and all those race-day notes packages, maybe there are 10 scenes etched so vividly in my mind’s eye that they appear sometimes as if by magic. Richmond’s qualifying run that day is one. His lap around CMS was similar to every lap during the final hour of qualifying at Indy.

My forgotten friend and I watched from the first turn. I’d say there were, oh, 30,000 people there. If the final performance of Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus had been conducted in the CMS tri-oval grass after qualifying on Thursday, I doubt the crowd would have been as high as it was for single-round, single-lap qualifying on an autumn afternoon more than 30 years ago. In the 1990s, 40,000 was about the average crowd for Coca-Cola 600 qualifying.

Now all the fans come out to CMS disguised as empty seats. Well behaved. Never buy hot dogs.

I’ve measured the decline of stock car racing a hundred ways. The ways are easy. Their relative importance is hard.

I keep hearing, the kids don’t care about cars. They don’t care about anything. They spend all their time listening to rap music, playing video games and posting to Instasnapbooker or something. They have short attention spans. Yet, oddly, they don’t like drag racing, either, and drag racing is short.

They have no passion. Thus must we squeeze every drop of it from NASCAR. Then they’ll love it.

In the upstate of South Carolina, you know what the kids still have passion for? The Clemson Tigers. They’re truer to their schools than the Beach Boys ever were. They’re scapegoats for every executive trying to pass the buck on his cockamamie marketing campaign.

“Those kids of today.” They’ve been the lame excuse for every adult dysfunction since Louisa May Alcott was a schoolmarm.

The pole winner, circa 2017, talked about how his career has jelled at Stewart-Haas, and his hopes for Sunday, and the benefits of family and the serenity that comes with middle age. He also talked about how money isn’t everything. Easy for him to say, of course. He’s got a lot.

Harvick said some things in the sport have to be “bottom up” instead of “top down.” Specifically, he was talking about the Camping World Truck Series schedule and how he’d like to see it go back to the short tracks, but he could have been talking about most everything that has gone wrong.

Now qualifying is three rounds. It’s less likely the pole winner really drives the fastest car because going through those three rounds without using undue rubber is really the key. Was there a need to jazz up qualifying? The excitement of qualifying would be limited if they set them all on fire as they pulled off pit road … and then ran the burned-out hulks through the Laser Inspection Station, where, oddly enough, they’d probably pass with charred colors.

Who cares? Well, I once did, back when Richmond was the Count of Monte Carlo.

Midseason changes harm a sport’s credibility

The email subject from this morning seemed like a very late April Fools’ joke at first: “NASCAR Adds Fourth Stage to Coca-Cola 600.”

Oh no.

Look, I get what NASCAR and Charlotte Motor Speedway are trying to do here. The 600 is a long race, and dividing it into four 100-lap stages will break it up and make it more entertaining. Last year’s 600 was brutal — with 131 straight green-flag laps at one point — and people hated the race.

And the stages have added a lot to the racing this year, so an extra stage is fine. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if all races had four stages next year.

But…ughhhhhh.

What NASCAR fails to understand (or at least value highly enough) is how bad it looks to change rules in the middle of a season. These are the type of temptations a sanctioning body should avoid, because they harm credibility — and that’s very difficult to earn back.

Personally, I’m still affected by the worst decision of all time — adding a 13th driver to a 12-driver playoff in 2013. NASCAR changed forever for me that day, and I can honestly say I’ve never looked at NASCAR as a sport quite the same after that.

The Coke 600 decision isn’t on that level, but the concept is similar: A short-term play could have a long-lasting impact on people who are desperately clinging to the notion NASCAR is more of a sport than sports entertainment.

Yes, the “pure sport” aspect has been gone for awhile now — I get that — but it’s painful to see NASCAR toss aside more of its credibility.

That’s what makes this the wrong move.

NASCAR announced stage lengths for every race on Feb. 16. It said each race would have the same amount of stage points and playoff points, except for the Daytona 500 (which had 10 more stage points — but not playoff points — thanks to the Duels).

Now — less than two weeks before the 600 — NASCAR has suddenly decided a certain race is worth more stage points than other races. And it’s worth more playoff points than any other race.

Think about that: Drivers can earn more playoff points in the Coke 600 than they can in the Daytona 500.

That’s very troubling for purposes of consistency. All races should pay the same amount of points. And if they don’t, NASCAR should announce that at the start of the season — not 13 days before the race.

It’s really disappointing NASCAR decided to do this. Want to add a fourth stage to one race for entertainment purposes? Then at least do it before the season. Announce it, let people digest it and come to terms with it.

But by doing it now, NASCAR misjudged what’s more valuable: One night at Charlotte or its credibility as a sanctioning body.