Kyle Busch completed an unprecedented, monumental feat last Sunday in winning the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
The victory gave the driver of the No. 18 Joe Gibbs racing Toyota a win at every Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series track at which he has competed.
Only one problem. Busch expects the accomplishment to be short-lived. With the addition of the road course at Charlotte this fall for the first elimination race in the Playoff, Busch expects the arbiters of the sport—whoever they may be—to demand that he take the checkered flag on the “new and different” track.
“Everybody wants to make my life more difficult,” quipped Busch, who was fastest in Saturday’s final practice for Sunday’s Pocono 400 (2 p.m. ET on FS1, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). “So I’m sure that I won’t be credited for all the race tracks once the Roval gets here, so that would certainly be the next one that comes up.
“It’s in the same vicinity. Richard Petty has won 13 races at Richmond, right, but nobody characterizes the dirt track versus the pavement track being different.”
In fact, Petty won on three different iterations of Richmond Raceway, both on dirt and pavement, but never on the current .75-mile configuration. But a big item on Busch’s bucket list is a race Petty won seven times.
“It’s my life, so we’ll just keep going, keep trying to win in it, and the Roval is next,” Busch said. “And then after that, it’s about the Daytona 500 and trying to get that one.
“It took another guy that’s very, very popular (Dale Earnhardt Sr.) 20 years to get it done, so I’d like to think it won’t take me that long, although I’m creeping up on that number. So we’ll see how soon we can get that one accomplished.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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