Kyle Busch Buschwhacks Again!
Kyle Busch Buschwhacks Again!
NASCAR's all-time leading winner scooped up another W on Saturday.
Short post here today — but after Kyle Busch won the Truck Series race at Atlanta on Saturday afternoon, I had to break out one of my favorite stats in all of sports.
The victory for Busch (who is a tremendous driver and a 2-time Cup Series champ, I should preface by saying) was the 230th of his overall NASCAR national series career, extending his all-time lead over “The King”, Richard Petty, to 30 wins. That sounds really impressive… until you realize that 167 of those 230 wins were achieved in NASCAR’s lower-tier circuits — the Truck Series and the Xfinity Series. (By comparison, all 200 of Petty’s wins came in the Cup Series, the sport’s highest level.)
The practice of dipping down a level or two to pick up wins is even known as “Buschwhacking” — in part because the Xfinity Series used to be sponsored by Busch beer, but also because Kyle Busch is the undisputed master of it. Others on the career leaderboard have also padded their win totals some by winning in the series that are supposed to be more developmental, but nobody has done this anywhere near as often — or as effectively — as Busch:
For the average driver with at least 40 career wins across all the series, 28.7% of their total victories came in the Xfinity or Truck Series. But for Busch, that number is an incredible 72.9%. Even granting that the Xfinity Series didn’t launch until 1982, and the Trucks only began in 1995, that’s still a remarkable difference between Busch and the rest of NASCAR’s greatest drivers.
You might be wondering, why is this kind of thing even allowed? I’ll quote myself from this post I wrote after another of his Buschwhacked wins last season:
There are reasons why big-time drivers would Buschwhack… Track time is precious, and using another series for live practice undeniably helps a driver prepare for a subsequent Cup Series race on the same track. It also got easier to pull double-duty after the NASCAR schedule was adjusted in the early 2000s such that most Busch Series races were companions to a Cup Series race. And from a promoter’s viewpoint, having bigger names in your lower-tier race is a better draw, even if it comes at the expense of development for up-and-coming drivers. Although NASCAR started cracking down on the practice in the 2010s, stars will still show up in the odd lower-level race even to this day.
So while it’s less common now than earlier in his career, Busch showed yet again on Saturday that whenever he is in the field of a lower-tier race, he is a serious threat to win. Because when it comes to the all-time, all-series NASCAR leaderboard, all 230 of those trophies count the same.
Filed under: NASCAR