KYLE BUSCH COMES FROM BEHIND TO WIN AT HOME TRACK
Imagine Greg Maddux pitching in a pivotal game and getting the last strikeout for a major league victory on his old Valley High School diamond.
Or Andre Agassi pounding a match-winning groundstroke to win a major tennis title here.
Neither of those great athletes, who call Las Vegas home, ever had that chance. But NASCAR racer Kyle Busch has had that chance the past five years and on Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, he capitalized on the opportunity on a perfect day for racing.
The 23-year-old native son not only won the Shelby 427 Sprint Cup race before about 140,000, he did it by starting deeper in the 43-car field than any of the event’s previous 12 winners.
“I tell you what, this is pretty cool,” he said. “I didn’t know exactly what it would mean, but coming to the checkered flag, there were knots in my stomach. It’s bigger than winning the Daytona 500. I said it wasn’t going to be, but it is.”
It’s Busch’s first Cup win of the season, and 12th in 153 races. The near-capacity crowd, which didn’t seem to let a bad economy stop them from attending, didn’t rush to beat the anticipated post-race traffic jam.
Instead, nearly all stayed in the grandstand to savor Busch’s long, smoky celebratory burnouts at the start-finish line. After getting out of the car to capture the winning checkered flag, he kneeled at the finish line and kissed the track.
“When we were racing out at the Bullring, this was nothing but a dirt lot,” he said. “This was actually part of the parking lot I think for the Bullring racetrack. So it’s come a long way.
“I’ll do it (kiss the track) every time I win here. I don’t plan to do it at every track; some of them are pretty dirty.” Busch won the pole for the race on Friday, but a mechanical problem forced his Joe Gibbs Racing team to replace the engine resulting in an automatic NASCAR penalty that dropped him to the 38th starting spot.
The worse qualifying position for the past 11 Las Vegas Cup winners had been 25th. No driver had ever won the pole and won the race at the 1.5-mile tri-oval located across from Nellis Air Force Base.
The graduate of Durango High School, who now lives in Mooresville, N.C., isn’t new to milestones. When older brother Kurt Busch, the 2004 Cup series champion, qualified second to him on Friday, they became only the third pair of brothers to claim the front row for a Cup race in the 61-year history of NASCAR.
Contact reporter Jeff Wolf at jwolf @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0247
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