Wily Busch shows car who’s boss

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This is the kind of car Kyle Busch drove Sunday in the NASCAR Shelby 427 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway: One that was loose all afternoon, needed major adjustments, wasn’t the fastest, started from the back and was average enough for Busch’s crew chief to say the team needed to scratch and claw and kick and spit and fight just to have an opportunity at winning.

Which should tell you everything about the guy behind the wheel.

On pure racing skill, Busch is now comparable to his NASCAR peers on the same scale as fans’ worship of Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Unrivaled.

That the victory came on Busch’s home track only made his achievement more significant for the driver who cut his stock-car teeth at the Bullring beyond Turn 2 of the Speedway.

That the kid who graduated one year early from Durango High in order to begin chasing his racing dream full time laid down to kiss the start-finish line shortly after receiving the checkered flag spoke to the magnitude of the moment.

But what shouldn’t be lost in the feel-good hometown story line is a fact that has become increasingly obvious the last year: Busch could drive a jalopy through the worst whiteout conditions and make it look easy.

He has within him what few professional athletes ever own: The talent to dominate other greats in his sport.

His begins above the neck.

"It is really hard to measure the best driver from others," team owner J.D. Gibbs said. "But more than anyone I have ever been around, Kyle is a student of the sport. He knows cars, almost too much sometimes. It’s like having a crew chief driving the car."

This isn’t by accident. Busch didn’t wake up one day hoping to drive cars for a living and the next day win 21 races in NASCAR’s top three divisions in one season, which he managed in 2008.

He watched his father Tom and older brother Kurt race at the Bullring. He learned as much about what was under a hood as about when best to pass. When other kids built model airplanes, he was building racing engines.

His father demanded the boys work on any car they planned to race. His mother Gaye demanded their schoolwork not suffer because of it. At Durango, the younger Busch once took a class on public speaking to prepare himself for the interview demands required of famous athletes.

Much of his success at age 23 can be explained. One part can’t. As with Tiger Woods in golf or Kobe Bryant in basketball, there are few blessed with an implausible gift in sport.

It’s true equipment plays a huge part. Separating the best drivers in NASCAR is difficult because each week brings different strategies and different cars and different problems that need solutions. Much luck is involved in when cautions happen and when they don’t. Busch got some of it Sunday.

But it’s not just fortuitous timing or the car, and there are plenty examples of average drivers with good enough rides to prove it.

Busch is one of those who can take a car that began 38th Sunday, was probably at a top-10 level given how inconsistent it ran and be the one doing burnouts on the apron at the end of the day.

Tight. Loose. Wild out of the corners. Nothing about a car seems to faze Busch. No one is as versatile, as able to be so successful in Trucks, Nationwide and Sprint Cup. No one is thought so unbeatable when he has a lead late.

Busch hasn’t won a season championship. Jimmie Johnson owns the last three. Busch will never be as popular with fans as others among the sport’s elite, still viewed by many as a brash, arrogant kid, a role he has embraced publicly at times. He is smart enough to realize every good story needs a villain.

But if your life savings depended on needing one driver to win one NASCAR race and you stripped away all but natural ability, choosing someone other than Kyle Busch would be done out of spite and not intelligence.

"Today was very, very cool," he said. "We had to work on the car a lot. It was really, really loose in the beginning. I wasn’t sure if it was me or the car.

"I told myself, ‘You better man up and drive this thing or else we’re not going to go anywhere.’ ”

If driving was all it needed, that loose car was fortunate it had the sport’s finest behind the wheel.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at 702-383-4618 or egraney@reviewjournal.com.