Columnist Ron Kantowski: No kidding: Kyle shows he belongs

Monday, March 14, 2005 | 9:59 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, and they'll also put a heck of a smudge on a custom paint job. That's something Kurt Busch is about to find out, after finishing third, one spot behind his precocious 19-year-old racing brother Kyle, in Sunday's UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, their hometown track.

"He definitely can take the 4-wheeler and spray rocks on the side of my truck if he wants because he did a great job," said Kurt Busch, 26, about trading paint in the Busch League -- unsanctioned off-road races against his kid brother at the family's home-away-from-home compound outside of Charlotte, N.C.

As for the words that probably will never hurt Kyle Busch, well, the critics who were foolish enough to utter them already have started to take them back. On national TV, no less.

"I guess he is challenging me for saying he has come up (through the ranks to Nextel Cup) too soon," said Fox TV analyst Jeff Hammond, one of Kurt Busch's former crew chiefs, after Kyle Busch gave race winner Jimmie Johnson a mirror-full in the closing laps Sunday in front of a record crowd of 156,000 Budweiser drinkers at the 1.5-mile oval.

With a second and two thirds in three starts, Kurt Busch's Nextel Cup title defense is off to a flying start. But during the postrace festivities, he seemed more interested in lavishing praise on the kid brother he used to call "Shrub."

"Congratulations to my little brother and it officially stops now -- the advice to Kyle -- because he beat me fair and square," said Kurt Busch, who might have finished one spot ahead of his brother, were it not for an extra midrace pitstop to fasten loose lug nuts.

"It looks like the only place I beat my little brother today was here to the media center."

A couple of minutes later, Kyle joined him, prefacing his remarks by pouring a bottle of water down the back of his brother's driving suit. With their parents, Tom and Gaye, absent, it appeared the news conference might degenerate into a modern-day episode of "Leave It To Beaver."

Kyle: "Aw, gee, Kurt, that was really swell of you."

Kurt: "You know, you're still a squirt, but you sure do drive fast."

This might have been the first time in Kyle's nine-race Nextel Cup career when he drove fast and smart.

In the season opener at Daytona, he was plenty quick but found himself, as rookies often do, in the middle of a multicar pileup. Two weeks ago, he was even quicker at California Speedway, speeding to the pole position, before he autographed the wall with the right side of his car early in the race, dropping him back to 23rd in the final order.

But on Sunday, he kept his nose cleaner than a champion terrier at the Westminster Kennel Club. And when his crew finally sorted out his car's handling, Busch the younger charged from 10th at the 180-lap juncture to second at the end, where he finished 1.6 seconds behind his teammate Johnson.

Although he was pleased with his runner-up finish, the younger Busch said it really didn't surprise him, his wetness behind the ears notwithstanding. Nor, he said, did it surpass any of his five victories in the Busch Series last year. So maybe the dialogue in that Dale Earnhardt movie, when the Intimidator says finishing second just means he was the first loser, isn't as hokey as it sounds to us non-paint-traders.

"If it was a win, probably," Kyle said when asked if finishing second here in a Cup race surpassed running out front anywhere else, like in the Busch Series. "It's just another one of those second-place finishes that we could have turned into a win. I can't say it's bigger than any of our Busch Series victories just yet."

Well, at least he is honest, but that's one soft and fuzzy Las Vegas angle to this story you can drive behind the pit wall.

Speaking of fuzzy, that also would describe Busch's choirboy cheeks as well as his recollection of running side by side with his brother Sunday. He said he really didn't remember it.

So you can forget that angle, too.

"I'm trying to think of a time where we ran side by side," Kyle Busch said. "I don't know if he was passing me ... he probably was passing me."

In Kyle's defense, the Brothers Busch passed so many cars on Sunday that it was probably hard to remember who and when. And Kyle Busch came up just a little short of passing the fastest guy of all.

Late in the race, when Johnson got bogged in traffic, Busch pulled to within seven-tenths of a second of his teammate's rear spoiler. Had he gotten a little closer and made the pass, Busch would have become the Cup series' youngest winner of all time. David Thomas was 20 years and 129 days old when he won his first race but that was in 1952, when NASCAR was just getting started and didn't check the IDs of the few drivers who had them.

It was a lot easier breaking in back then. Basically, all you had to do is paint a number on the side of the old Merc you drove to work, roll up a pack of cigarettes in your T-shirt sleeve and step on the gas.

It's a lot harder to break in now, so Kyle Busch owes much of his success to his older brother. Although Kurt began running with the fast crowd just a little bit later than Kyle, serving an apprenticeship in the Craftsman Trucks instead of the Busch series, he was just as quick right out of the box while catching the eye of renowned Roush Racing.

It was kind of like taking a kid straight from violin recital and putting him on stage with the Boston Pops. With Kurt Busch going everywhere fast with Roush, the Hendrick Motorsports team, another of the NASCAR Rockerfellers, figured why not let his kid brother play second fiddle to Johnson and Jeff Gordon, its front-line drivers?

Auto racing is a unique sport in that the equipment, the car, is just as important as the player, the driver -- maybe even more so. But as Johnny Rutherford, the three-time Indy 500 champion used to say as technology made the driver's role increasingly less important, at least in his style of racing, "I've yet to see a car go around the track by itself."

Although it might have looked like Kyle Busch's No. 5 Chevy was running on auto pilot Sunday, like it had an antenna on top with somebody working the controls from pit lane, trust me, there was a kid with a load of talent behind the wheel.

In NASCAR, that makes two of them with the same name.