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NASCAR Nationwide Series
NNS: Kyle Busch Movin’ On Up
Kyle Busch Motorsports has grown to more than 50 employees…
Tom Jensen  |  Posted January 24, 2012   Concord, NC
Kyle Busch already has proven his talents as a wheelman. Now the challenge is, how good can Busch be as a NASCAR team owner?

After two successful seasons in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, earning one owner championship and one runner-up, Kyle Busch Motorsports is expanding into the NASCAR Nationwide Series with a Monster Energy-sponsored No. 54 Toyota Camry that Busch will share with older brother Kurt. KBM also will continue to field a Truck Series entry, with Jason Leffler and others sharing seat time.

“For Samantha (Busch’s wife) as well as myself, this is something we’re trying to grow from the ground up,” Busch said Tuesday afternoon in an exclusive interview with SPEED.com. “It isn’t something that I’ve inherited. It means a lot to me to try to grow and make it an organization that can sustain itself. It’s been tough. Certainly there’s been a lot of growing pains, and without the partners and sponsors and the support of Toyota and everybody involved, we wouldn’t be here.”

Busch is in a somewhat unique position with respect to his day job at Joe Gibbs Racing, where he drives the No. 18 Camry in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.

Forty of Busch’s series-record 51 NNS race victories have come behind the wheel of JGR entries, but now he will be competing against that team for race victories, the series owner championship and even sponsor dollars, all while continuing to drive for JGR at the Cup level.

“I felt like now was a good time,” said Busch. “We’ve got a good foundation with the Truck Series stuff. Let’s throw a Nationwide team in there, too, and try to grow that. Having the right people made it something that was easy to do. Bringing (NNS crew chief) Mike Beam over was something that I wanted to do. There’s a few other teams like Rusty (Wallace’s) place and (Kevin) Harvick’s place that shut down, where we were able to get some good people from.”

Busch will lean very heavily on a veteran crew — competition director Rick Ren, Beam and older brother Kurt.

“I think he can shorten the learning curve a tremendous amount,” Kyle said of Kurt. “With having my brother and myself race it this year, that’s two championship-caliber drivers who are going to be able to give the right feedback, and give the right direction on where we need to go, the right path we need to head down, what’s wrong, what’s right, that sort of thing.”

Brothers Kyle (Right) and Kurt Busch (Left) are sharing a Nationwide Series ride in 2012. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
It was not an easy sell for Busch when dealing with team owners Joe and J.D. Gibbs.

“When I first started talking to them about it, I started talking to J.D. and he was really apprehensive towards it,” Busch said. “He didn’t like the idea. He was like, ‘Man I really don’t want to be competing against you.’

“And I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got a sponsor that wants to go Nationwide racing and they don’t really care about Truck racing. So I can’t start another Truck team. That’s not going to work. This is what I’ve got to do,’” Busch told J.D. Gibbs. “We went back and forth a little bit about how it was going to work. Where was I going to get cars and engines from?”

Joe Gibbs was even more opposed initially, but Busch prevailed and everyone professes to be good with it now.

“At the end of the day, it’s important to me,” said Busch. “It’s something that I want to see succeed. And it’s not that I want to compete against Joe Gibbs Racing, it’s that I want Kyle Busch Motorsports to one day be a Joe Gibbs Racing, you know? And I think this is the way you do it and this is the way you grow it.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.
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