Kyle Busch says this next crop of NASCAR talent just has a fundamentally different way of racing than the generation that came before them, which includes him.
The remarks were made in an interview with Kevin Harvick in his Happy Hour YouTube show. Busch and Harvick largely shared the same tenure at the highest levels and it features a more respectful ‘give and take’ mentality compared to the one today best articulated as ‘cutthroat.’
Harvick asked him if a driver ever pulled Busch aside and gave him a talking to.
“Tony Stewart,” Busch said.
Busch then explained a story about a season, before ‘Rowdy’ even won a race in which they had a couple of run-ins.
“I think it was Vegas,” Busch said. “I made him mad at Vegas. It was in the last 25 laps of the race. I cut him off a couple of times. He tried to get back at me and missed and ended up fencing himself off (Turn 2) I think I finished third and I think he ended 15th to 20th because he killed his car, steel body cars, right?
“He was not too thrilled with me. He was mad at me for another two months and then finally we had another run in and I went over to his bus and I was like … no, Eddie (Jarvis) called me over to his bus so I was on pins and needles … we went into this bus and he was like ‘hey man, you’re young and fast, you can do this, you’re going to be a multiple race winner, champion, you’re going to be fine but you just have to figure out how to rein it all in and be under control and do the things,’ how that era of how things were done.
“That was the Mark Martin era, the Jeff Gordon era, the Tony Stewart era – you were there, the Harvick era. That was a different era than what we’re in today. People ask me all the time like, ‘Why don’t you take these kids under your wing and teach them and tell them.’
“I’m like, we’re in a completely different era now. There is no fixing what we’ve got going right now with everybody running over everybody. They would much rather crash than win a race, I don’t get it.”
What brought forth this conversation?
Carson Hocevar, the 22-year-old hard-driving second-year Cup Series driver, that has made a lengthy list of adversaries in his first handful of seasons driving at the highest levels. Busch first had a run-in with him a decade ago at Kalamazoo Speedway in Michigan before their most recent issue at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
“So, the Hocevar problem, the biggest problem I have with him is when he was 13, 14 years old whatever it was, I was racing at one of his home tracks in Michigan with a super late model while I was a Cup guy,” Busch said. “… It was Kalamazoo. Lap 8, Lap 11 somewhere early in the race, like, I wasn’t that great but I was going to bide my time and I was just riding, right? Like, you ride. He comes right up alongside of me, sideswipes me, puts me into the frontstretch fence, and goes on. And I’m like, ‘What the hell just happened?’ Never nothing after the fact, never a sorry, ‘Hey, my bad.’ Like, same thing right now. He hasn’t learned not one thing because he hasn’t been under someone’s wing this entire time.”
