There’s an old saying in NASCAR oftentimes when there is a crash between two drivers that could very easily have been avoided, except one driver “ran out of talent”. Such was the case in last year’s Cup race at World Wide Technology Raceway aka Gateway, outside of St. Louis.
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NASCAR Cup’s two Kyles, Larson and Busch, were battling each other for seventh place with 10 laps left in Stage 2 on the 1.6-mile oval, when they got together on Lap 140. Busch got the worst part of the deal, as his race immediately ended due to damage, finishing 35th in the 36-car field.
Meanwhile, Larson backed his No. 5 Team Hendrick Chevrolet into the wall, sustaining minor damage and was able to recover, bouncing back for a strong 10th-place finish.
Here’s what Larson said after last year’s incident, via Sportsnaut.com: “I always do a really good job at looking back at accidents that I get in and whether it be that I caused it or I didn’t cause it. I still try to pinpoint what kind of fault I had in it.
“Yeah, I look at that one, if I didn’t barely touch his quarter panel to get to a side draft he wouldn’t have gotten upset and started running into me down the straightaway and then crowd me into [Turn] 1.
“I wasn’t going into 1 to race him and have a dick-measuring contest. I was just trying to make it into the corner. So yeah if I didn’t touch his quarter we would have raced just fine through 1.
“I look at it as probably more my fault there but into one I know I’m the guy that spun but I don’t feel that part was at all my fault. It’s just racing and he got frustrated and I don’t know, I’m sure he’s not too frustrated with me right now.”
Recently, Busch was asked if he recalled the incident and what he remembers from it.
“From what I recall, Kyle (Larson) caught me from a ways back and it’s hard to pass with these cars, obviously,” Busch said. “So I guess he felt it when he got to me, he needed to nerf me a little bit and get me up out of the groove.
“I guess I just wasn’t too happy with that and crowded him a little bit getting into Turn 1, he lost his race car and we both ended up crashed. I guess that’s part of the course.”
Harvick blames Busch for the incident with Larson
Kevin Harvick talked about last year’s incident at length on an edition of his Happy Hour podcast a few days later.
“I viewed that as a little bit of frustration from Kyle Busch with Kyle Larson and pretty quickly,” Harvick said of the initial contact between the two Kyles coming down the frontstretch. “It didn’t look like a lot of contact to me.
“I think that pressure is ramping up on Kyle Busch. I’ve been there. Those scenarios where he hasn’t won in a year, 19 years in a row, and now he’s looking to extend that win streak. He’s had a lot of terrible things have happened with the pit crew. The pit crew hasn’t done a great job at all.
“Kyle’s had a few of these moments with a few guys on the racetrack, so his fuse is short, but it’s short for a reason, and that’s because the cars aren’t running good and they’re not getting the finishes. There’s not many people that are as good as Kyle Busch at what they do.”
The incident with Larson was almost identical to one Kyle Busch had with his older brother, Kurt, in 2007 in the NASCAR Cup All-Star Race, with $1 million on the line. The younger Busch brother thought he could push his elder sibling around, but he was wrong, and put both drivers out of the race and lost their respective bids for the big money.
For the record, Kurt finished 19th and Kyle 20th in the 21-driver All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway. And ironically, Harvick wound up winning that race and the cool $1 mill.
Kyle Busch: ‘I should have learned my lesson’ (back then)
While the replay still looks like it was Kyle that caused the crash with his sibling, Kyle recently said it was the other way around.
“I should have learned my lesson on how crowding somebody will crash somebody because my brother did that to me in 2007 at Charlotte,” Kyle Busch said. “We both made mistakes in that race, but we certainly came out on the worst end of it.”
You would have thought “Rowdy” Busch would have learned his lesson after that wreck, but given it was 17 years previous to last year’s run-in with Larson, maybe he just forgot, right?
Well, maybe. Things will likely be much different in this year’s race at WWTR, which is hosting its first-ever NASCAR Cup playoff race.
By the way, going back to Harvick’s comments about last year’s wreck, Busch still has not won a race since 2023. He comes into Sunday’s race riding the worst winless streak of his career: it’s now at 84 straight races without a win.
