Kyle Busch could win his first NASCAR championship title this year. (Photo: Getty Images)

Busch believes his success has validated his decision to run all 35 races in 2009 after a 30-race campaign in 2008. And he also has no regrets about his partial schedule for Billy Ballew Racing in the Camping World Truck Series.

Busch has seven wins in 13 Truck starts and still has a shot at helping team owner Billy Ballew pick up the 2009 owners championship.

Such magical runs in the Nationwide and Truck series have served as somewhat of a consolation prize for Busch after missing the Chase in a season when he was expected to seriously contend for the Cup title.

“If you can win a Nationwide championship and the owners championship for Ballew and miss out on the Chase, I would feel like that’s a successful year,” he says. “People might question where my focus is – it’s supposed to be on the Cup side – but to be honest with you, we didn’t have the cars capable enough of getting ourselves into the Chase. That’s why we missed the Chase. It’s not due to a lack of focus or lack of effort by the team or me or anybody else involved. It’s just situationally, it didn’t work out.”

Ratcliff says that the up-and-down nature of Busch’s Cup season probably put a little extra pressure on the Nationwide team to help their driver run well.

“We hoped that we would put good enough cars on the race track that he could go out there and not be concerned with what’s happening over there [in Cup], good or bad,” he says. “Just be able to come over here and have a good time, win some races, shoot for this championship, and it would be kind of a different environment for him. And I think we’ve done that.”

Busch takes even more pride in his Nationwide season knowing that his main competition has come from fellow full-time Cup drivers. While Edwards is the only other full-time Cup driver running the whole Nationwide schedule, multiple Cup drivers and teams have entered most of the races.

So you might say that Busch subscribes to the theory that if you can’t beat them on Sundays, you might as well try to on Saturdays. And he has – often.

“It makes it better when you’ve got the Cup guys that come over to race with you on the Nationwide tour,” he says. “If it was just me racing against the rest of the [Nationwide] guys, then it would look kind of silly. … But we still have guys like Jeff Burton, Clint Bowyer - I can’t even name them all - Greg Biffle, Matt Kenseth, you know them.

“Since all those guys come over and race with us. That’s what makes it fun because you go out there and you can beat those guys, and you know they’re at Roush [Fenway Racing], [Richard Childress Racing}, who dominated this thing a few years ago, [and] are in good cars. You know that you’re not an idiot, and you know you can drive. At least it makes it a little easier when you look at things.”

SceneDaily.com • Nationwide drivers Carl Edwards Brad Keselowski prepared to battle for points at Phoenix