In retrospect, maybe too fast for the driver known as “The Outlaw.”
Busch won his first midget car race at age 15 in a small town in Nevada, leading to a meteoric rise. He won the Cup championship just 11 years later in 2004 and finished his 23-year professional career with 43 wins across NASCAR’s three national series before a concussion ended his time behind the wheel in 2023.
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On Friday night, Busch, 47, will be inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame along with fellow drivers Harry Gant and Ray Hendrick, capping a drama-filled race that had more twists and shifts in momentum than your typical Sunday stock car race.
There were clashes with NASCAR. Clashes with owners and crew members of their own racing teams. Altercations with other drivers and reporters. Suspensions and layoffs became synonymous with the Busch name.
There were also well-publicized relationship problems off the track.
“There’s definitely knowledge and wisdom that youth doesn’t have,” Busch said with a laugh Thursday when asked if he would do things differently during an interview with The Associated Press. “And if I could, I would have told my younger self to be more patient and not get so excited and excited when things went wrong.
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“It was like I was on too many highs and too many lows,” Busch continued. “I think if I could have smoothed it out a little bit, the road would have been easier for me, so to speak.”
Getting to the Hall of Fame was not an easy journey for Busch, who burned many bridges and made many enemies along the way, often drawing unnecessary negative attention to himself due to his short temper.
In 2005, his tumultuous six-year run with Roush Racing, which included several on-track incidents, came to an end when the team suspended him for the final two races of the season after police stopped him near the Phoenix track on suspicion of driving while intoxicated for being uncooperative and belligerent with officers.
During a 2007 race at Dover for Team Penske, Busch recklessly hit a crew member from Tony Stewart’s team on pit road and was parked by NASCAR for the remainder of the race.
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His time at Penske ended in 2011 after a confrontation with a member of the media. A year later, racing’s governing body suspended Busch for another incident in which he threatened another journalist after a race at Dover.
Busch was suspended again before the 2015 season by NASCAR after a judge said the former champion almost certainly strangled and beat an ex-girlfriend and that there was a “substantial probability” he would suffer more domestic violence in the future.
Busch was never charged for the incident and was later reinstated by NASCAR.
As Busch got older, he started to mellow a bit.
He drove his Stewart-Haas Racing Ford to its only Daytona 500 victory in 2017 and then helped lay the foundation for 23XI Racing led by Denny Hamlin and former NBA star Michael Jordan, driving the No. 45 Toyota Camry and serving as veteran leader for the team’s expansion to a two-car operation.
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Busch said Thursday that his rapid rise from winning the second competitive race of his life in a midget car in Pahrump, Nevada as a teenager, to competing in the Cup Series at age 22 (he bypassed what was then known as the Busch Series and went straight to the big leagues because of his talent) never gave him the time to mature as a person.
At the time he called his rise “unexplored territory.”
“That trip and how fast it was, that’s why I wasn’t prepared to be a pro,” Busch said.
Busch, who followed his father Tom into auto racing and paved the way for his successful younger brother Kyle, said he was raised with a burning desire to win.
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And that never went away.
“My dad, when he ran, he went to the track and he wasn’t there to make friends,” Busch said. “He wasn’t there for the social hour. It was ‘We’re here for the trophy.'” So when you grow up with that mentality, that’s the tenacity and that’s what drove me.”
However, Busch does not look back on his tumultuous career with regret.
Despite the problems, despite the ups and downs along his path to the Hall, Busch said he “wouldn’t change a thing.”
“It was my ride and I have to be happy with it,” Busch said. “I’m very pleased with how it all turned out.”
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AP Auto Racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing