HEMBREE: Not Beating The Busches

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HEMBREE: Not Beating The Busches

Brother Kurt scores a milestone victory for Kyle Busch Motorsports…

Mike Hembree | Posted April 28, 2012 Richmond, VA

So this is what Kurt Busch meant by having fun.

In one of the best race finishes in any NASCAR series in recent years, Busch held off challenger Denny Hamlin in a wild, fender-banging, side-by-side duel for the win in Friday night’s Nationwide Series race at Richmond International Raceway.

Maybe it was the kind of racing Bruton Smith is trying to create with his weird grinding and shaving of the track surface in Bristol. But we won’t know about that until August.

Friday night was classic short-track racing. Hamlin chased down Busch in the twilight laps, gaining a little each time around the track until finally he was able to bulldoze his way inside Busch with the white flag in sight. That typically is a victory move because the inside, obviously, is the shortest way around the track.

But Busch held his positioning on the outside of Hamlin, keeping pace as they rolled through the final three-quarters of a mile. They touched fenders and then hit again as the rear end of Hamlin’s car slid to the right as they approached the checkered flag.

Busch stayed in the gas and won the race by .062 of a second.

The win was a landmark for the Busch boys, it being the first for team owner and younger brother Kyle, who was the first to greet Kurt after the race.

For so many years of their lives, they have been competitors – back to the days when they tried to beat each other in their Las Vegas driveway in whatever wheeled vehicles they could find. Friday night was about sharing a milestone victory as a family, and, for two guys who have been at the center of so much controversy (most of it self-generated), it was a rare moment of pure joy.

Kurt Busch celebrates his Nationwide Series victory on Friday night at Richmond International Raceway. (Photo: Getty Images)

Although Kyle has invested the money and time in building Kyle Busch Motorsports and bringing it to this level, the win perhaps meant more to Kurt, whose Sprint Cup season at his new address – Phoenix Racing – hasn’t gone well. He has stepped a few rungs down the ladder of fame after driving for Jack Roush and Roger Penske, and, although he still can make noise at Phoenix, Busch has been more about wrecked cars than big paychecks on the Sprint Cup side this year.

Signing on with his brother to run a partial schedule in Nationwide gave Kurt another outlet, and Friday night was the first chance to cash in those chips. Despite a fierce battle with Hamlin, he didn’t fail.

Since Kurt’s parting with Penske last season and the emergence of Kyle’s team, there has been considerable speculation that the brothers might wind up working together on the Sprint Cup level in future seasons.

The buzz in Richmond’s victory lane Friday night will do nothing to quiet that sort of talk.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike Hembree

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