New Hampshire Motor Speedway may be a long way from Kyle Busch’s native Las Vegas, but the driver of the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota has developed a fondness for the Magic Mile and its environs, dating to his days of racing Late Models.
“I love coming up here,” Busch said Friday at NHMS. “I’ve got a lot of friends from the area. I’ve raced over at Thunder Road (Barre, Vermont) before. I’ve race over at Oxford (Maine) before, so I’ve been around this area a little bit racing the short tracks and stuff.
“A few of those friends come on over here sometimes and visit a little bit, so that’s good.”
Then there’s the racing itself at the one-mile flat track. Busch got the third of his 55 career Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series victories at Loudon in 2006, driving for Rick Hendrick. He won again during his 2015 championship season and once more in 2017, both in the No. 18 JGR Toyota.
Small wonder Busch relishes his trips to New England.
“I enjoy coming to New Hampshire,” he said. “This has been a pretty successful place for us. We tend to qualify well here, race well here. We’ve won here a couple of times. We’ve been kind of the car to beat, one of the guys to beat here for about, I don’t know, the last two, three, four years maybe.
“Sometimes guys really, really hit on it, and the they’re better than us, (but) we’re just always consistently good here. So hopefully we can keep that pattern going at least and be consistently good here again, but maybe we can hit on it better than somebody else and try to win.”
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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