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Oh, how to revive a long dormant-blog? How about by being totally disgusted at the King? Sounds good, doesn't it?
Kyle Busch's season went down in flames, and in a hurry. Even under the old points system (without the Chase), he would still be third, 183 points behind Jimmie Johnson and 70 behind Carl Edwards. The guy who was winning everything suddenly has pieces failing and tires blowing left and right.
However, that doesn't change the fact that Kyle has won TWENTY races - so far - and that he is only the second driver to reach 20 wins in a season. Ever. Yes, he's won in the Nationwide Series and in the Truck Series, but in today's NASCAR the only way a guy is going to put up an outrageous number of wins is by running at least most of two series. Until we got to the Chase, Kyle was putting up one of the GREAT NASCAR seasons. Period.
Naturally, with the disappointment of his performance in the Chase comes analysis, like here by David Newton, one of the best NASCAR writers on ESPN.com. Right below the fold is this money quote from Richard Petty - The King. Ahem...
Petty, who won eight or more Cup races 12 times during his career, believes Busch earned more credit than he deserved for winning 12 times outside the Cup series anyhow.
"Hey, that's like me going back to running Caraway [Speedway], me being a Cup driver and stepping from the major leagues to the minor leagues or high school," said Petty, the all-time leader in Cup wins with 200. "Not throwing that much off on the Nationwide or Truck series, but it's not the same league.
"So, big deal."
Excuse me? RP - did you conveniently forget how different things were back then? Take a look. We'll use Petty's record-setting 1967 season, when he won 27 races, as reference.
- First - don't forget the fields in 1967 were extremely thin. Drivers could have run up to 48 total races that season. You know how many did that? One - The King. Only nine other drivers even ran 40 races. In other words, there were a few full-time drivers and lots of guys who ran partial schedules kind of like, oh, the Nationwide Series, circa forever.
- The smallest field Kyle Busch needed to overcome in one of his wins had 32 trucks - that was at the spring Truck race at Atlanta. Out of the King's 27 wins in 1967, do you know how many had less than 32 cars? How about 17, or nearly two-thirds of his wins that season.
- Nevermind that the Truck Series is run by a group of veterans - AA-level series or not, guy just don't show up with a bunch of talent and beat Ron Hornaday, Johnny Benson, Mike Skinner, Todd Bodine and the crew very regularly, do they? It is probably a deeper field in the Truck Series than the Nationwide Series, though Kyle had to beat may Cup drivers to win the Nationwide races he did.
- One thing I dislike about NASCAR's record-keeping - something I've gone over before - is how EVERY race from back in the day is counted as a race when they don't count today - hello, Daytona qualifers! - and how many small field/short distance-races - like, say, the Myers Brothers 250 at Winston-Salem, which had 18 cars and took 73 minutes to run and won by RP by three laps - count as much as last week's Martinsville race. Really? Kyle's shortest Truck win was at California - took 82 minutes, or nine minutes longer than that win by the King. In fact, only six of Kyle's wins this season have come in races shorter than two hours. Petty's '67 wins? Sixteen out of 27 were shorter than two hours.
So, yeah, other than the fact that well over half of his own wins in 1967 (and several other years before the schedule changed in 1972) had short fields and short distances, the King is exactly right. "Going back to run Caraway?" Heck, he DID that, practically. The only difference between THEN and NOW is that the lines are clear what is and isn't an elite, top-level race now when then there were a mix of junior-ish races and big boy ones.
It's not the King's fault, of course, but don't try to pump up your own achievements (which, by the way, are NEVER going to be remotely touched by today's drivers since the schedules are so different) but running down a guy who has done something turly historic this season, even if his fortunes got flipped in the end.
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