Busch matured quickly in NASCAR’s fast lane

Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2004 | 10:07 a.m.

Final Nextel Cup championship standings

Driver...Deficit

1. Kurt Busch...--

2. Jimmie Johnson...-8

3. Jeff Gordon...-16

4. Mark Martin...-107

5. Dale Earnhardt Jr....-138

6. Tony Stewart...-180

7. Ryan Newman...-326

8. Matt Kenseth...-437

9. Elliott Sadler...-482

10. Jeremy Mayfield...-506

HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- Kurt Busch's journey to the 2004 NASCAR Nextel Cup championship began a little more than a decade ago, in a Dwarf Car on a clay quarter-mile track in Pahrump.

Sunday evening, as he clutched the sterling silver Nextel Cup trophy on the champion's stage during a post-race celebration at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Busch acknowledged that the quaint Pahrump Valley Speedway seemed "a million miles away."

In the grand scheme of things, Busch later said, it wasn't all that long ago that he loaded the car he and his father, Tom, worked on in the garage behind their Las Vegas home and made the trip "over the hump" to Pahrump for his first race. And that, Busch said, may explain some of his struggles early in his NASCAR Cup career.

In his first three full seasons in NASCAR's premier series, there were penalties for mouthing off to NASCAR officials during a race, fines for admitted intentional contact with other competitors on the track, including a well-publicized feud with Jimmy Spencer that resulted in Spencer punching Busch in the mouth after a race last year at Michigan International Speedway.

Along the way, Busch also managed to rile several veteran drivers -- and their fans -- with his aggressive driving style that often resulted in crumpled fenders and perpetual grudges.

As Busch looked back on his turbulent entry to what was then called the Winston Cup Series with Roush Racing, he admitted that his rise to the NASCAR championship might have been too quick.

"One might argue that it hasn't been a long road," Busch, 26 said. "I've been very fortunate to slide into different rides. To be able to meet the right people and sponsors and car owners and crew chiefs, and to be able to do this in such a short time frame, it's mind-boggling to me.

"I've had so many things fall into place in my life that I'm very fortunate for. To be able to work for such a (high-) caliber team at such a young age was overwhelming to me and all I knew at that level was to go to the front, race as hard as I can and wrinkle fenders along the way -- that's how I thought I was supposed to race and that was the wrong mindset.

"When I raced with (crew chief) Jimmy Fennig my second year, he gave me great cars that would lead races and run up front. Now I'm an unpolished second-year driver that has equipment -- look out -- and I ran over people again. So it took some time for me to understand the bigger picture and to know that there was no real level higher than this and there never will be in my life."

Under the guidance of the veteran Fennig, who has put in 18 years as a NASCAR crew chief and finally was rewarded with his first Cup championship Sunday, Tom Busch and Roush, Busch said he gradually has able to smooth some of his rough edges.

"I'm fully committed to NASCAR and the Nextel Cup racing circuit and just to be able to understand the bigger ethic and the bigger picture about racing at this level is one thing that I misunderstood the first couple of years," Busch said.

"Now I've been able to put that in grasp and to learn from Jimmy Fennig, to learn from Jack Roush, and, of course, my father was always there. He was the first one that I'd go to after a race when I got home and ask him questions about what I did wrong and what I can do better. He's really helped me along to this point."

That maturity came into play Sunday during what could have been a disastrous sequence of events early in the championship-deciding Ford 400. After breaking a wheel -- a rare occurrence -- and then suffering through a botched pit stop, Busch at first exploded at his crew over the two-way radio, then quickly calmed down and got back to the task at hand.

Busch, who fell to as low as 28th before the midway point in the race, rallied for a fifth-place finish that clinched the Nextel Cup championship by 8 points over Jimmie Johnson and 16 points over four-time champion Jeff Gordon.

"I believe at that point in the race it was time to either shape up or ship out, and I wanted the team to rally behind everyone of themselves and to know that we had no more room for mistakes," Busch said. "And to have that circumstance of the wheel falling off, something that I've never had before, to have the miscommunication on what we were going to do as far as our pit stop, it was early enough in the race (to overcome it).

"Even if we have that toward the latter part of the race and didn't have the outcome that we had, it's a team effort. We got to this point because we're a team, and we were going to win this thing or lose this thing because we were a team. There wasn't going to be any finger pointing. I would take all responsibility because the media would've been on my shoulders afterwards."

Fennig, who headed Mark Martin's crew before moving over to Busch's team, said Busch's maturity shone during the 10-race Chase for the Championship.

"Kurt has been doing an awesome job on these last 10 races," Fennig said. "We ended up spinning out a couple times (but) he kept his cool, came back and we got a nice top-five finish. He just calmed down; everything's been cool. We have a long way to go, and at the end the results show it.

"He's been doing an awesome job at that."

Roush agreed, and said Busch's willingness to go to teammates Martin, Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle for advice also has been responsible for his progression as a driver and team leader.

"Kurt has had some lumps and bumps in his young career here," Roush said. "Kurt is an incredible quick study. Once he understands how something works, he never forgets it and he won't put it aside. If something happens that's not right for him or not good for him, then he makes the commitment to go forward and do it differently.

"If somebody had asked me what the thing is that's made the most difference as seen by me for Kurt this year is how close he's been to Mark and how close he's been to Matt and how close he's been to Greg Biffle and to watch him start to mentor, as he has, Carl Edwards, who has come along behind on the same path that Kurt came through just a couple years ago."

In hindsight, Busch, said, he might have handled his career a little differently rather then moving straight to the Cup Series after only one season in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.

"To come up from one series to the next, with not spending a certain amount of time (at any level) and learning the bad habits of what that series had within it or not developing the rapport with the drivers," led to many of his early problems, Busch said. "Jack moved me straight into Cup, with only one year -- six months -- of truck experience, and to go from the bullrings and the Saturday short tracks out in Las Vegas and relatively unknown to the truck world, then completely unknown to the Cup world, every single one of my mistakes were up at this elite level, and that's one thing that I did wrong.

"Maybe I should've waited another year in trucks, maybe I should've done a year in Busch, but one thing I'm able to say -- and it's because I'm in this position today -- is that we continued to race hard, we continued to learn hard lessons, and the knowledge that I have about racecars is fed from my father; it translated right into Jack's frame of mind.

"I was a racer at heart -- that's all I wanted to do was race -- and I didn't understand the bigger picture, so the results came quick, but the rough edges of the other things were a bit more magnified."

But one had the feeling that Busch wouldn't have traded any of the rough times for the feelings he was experiencing as he hoisted the first NASCAR Nextel Cup championship trophy Sunday night.

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