By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
Brad Keselowski, like all other drivers, entered Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway under a cloud of deep somber. Two-time Cup Series champion Kyle Busch died Thursday from a brief illness, which stunned the industry and left it without one of its all-time major stars.
For fellow Cup champion Keselowski, the loss has yet to become a normal thought.
“I don’t know if it’s soaked in for me fully,” Keselowski said Saturday. “I’ve been racing or going to racetracks and competing against Kyle Busch since 2001, so that’s 24-25 years.
“It certainly will be different [without him]. He brought a lot of different things to this sport and specifically on track a lot of different ways of looking at it – fresh ideas.”
Like many others, Keselowski had his run-ins with Busch on the track and off, highlighted perhaps by him calling Busch “an ass” during driver intros at Bristol Motor Speedway in 2010, to the roar of the crowd.
In recent years, however, their relationship had begun to soften. And as recently as last week, they were inching closer in friendship.
“With respect to our relationship, I would say there was a small thaw over the last year, maybe two, that came from his circumstances being different with respect to race teams and positions on the grid,” he said. “It was interesting to see and it was thawing almost more by the weekend.
“I flew with Kyle Busch on the way to Dover last Friday and those are things I never thought I would say three, five, 10 years ago. So, I think it was on that path. I don’t have any great stories to tell, but it’s sad to not see that through. Whatever loss I have there, honestly, pales in comparison to many others, so I don’t want to overplay that, but it’s the reality.”
Though Keselowski’s full-time Cup career started five years after Busch’s, much of their success overlapped, including their three combined championships and 87 of their combined 99 race wins.
The respect only grew as did their age and status on the track and off.
“Even before everything happened over the last few days, I was thinking about it. I was behind Kyle one time [at Charlotte] a number of years ago. This would have been 10-15 years ago and he was running down here in turns three and four. He had this unique line where he wouldn’t arc the corner, but he would kind of hit the apron really early and make the car turn, and he was making it work really well.
“I still remember being behind him and seeing him do that because, at the time, the dialogue of how to run this racetrack was off of Jimmie Johnson, who would come into Turn 3 and he would start at the top of the racetrack with this huge arc down to the bottom and then run up off the corner with a lot of speed. Kyle’s approach was like a 180 of that.
“He had a way that was something that I saw and added that to the playbook. ‘When my car is driving a certain way, this is how I’m gonna run this track.’ So, I was thinking about that this week as I was preparing to run the race. I need to make sure that’s in my playbook for if my car is driving a certain way.
“Drivers learn from other drivers. It’s totally natural. You just seemed to learn more from Kyle than most other drivers.”
Keselowski had hopes of possibly joining the NASCAR Hall of Fame with Busch one day, had their inductions taken place in the same year.
“Kind of selfishly I was hopeful for a long time that our racing career would continue on a journey that saw us in the Hall of Fame and doing those types of things together,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe one day competing in the Truck Series against each other when we were done with Cup. Obviously, that’s not going to be the case now.”
Following a stretch of tragedies in the sport, including Greg Biffle last December, Keselowski says some losses ‘hit harder and wider than others.’
“Kyle’s loss is the whole industry’s loss, and the industry has had a lot of losses here in the last five or six months,” he said. “That seems to come in waves. I don’t know why that is, so it’s been a tough few months for the industry and this is another hard one.
“I don’t want to try to weigh one against another, but it’s a tough part of this sport. There are a lot of people in this garage area. I did some napkin math a few months ago and I figure there are about 10,000 people that work in this industry, whether it’s at the teams or at NASCAR or at the racetracks. The events go on because of them and some of them have more notoriety than others, which is natural, but whenever you have a group of people that large, there is going to be loss.
“There’s going to be moments of pain and some just naturally hit harder and wider than others and Kyle’s hits pretty deep.”