There’s an old saying in NASCAR that’s used when a crash occurs between two drivers that could have easily been avoided. They say one driver “ran out of talent”. That was the case in last year’s Cup race at World Wide Technology Raceway, a.k.a 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 when they got together on Lap 140. Busch got the worst part of the deal on the 1.25-mile oval that day.
Busch’s race immediately ended due to damage, and he finished 35th in the 36-car field. Larson, who backed his No. 5 Team Hendrick Chevrolet into the wall, sustained minor damage. He then bounced back for a strong 10th-place finish.
“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,” Larson told Sportsnaut.com after the race last year.
“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,” he explained.
Larson then explained how he was not in a position to do anything to avoid the collision. “I wasn’t going into 1 to race him and have a d**k-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,” he said.
“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,” added Larson.
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.”
Kevin Harvick talked about last year’s incident at length on an edition of his Happy Hour podcast a few days later.
Harvick blames Busch for the incident with Larson
“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 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. He’s won 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,” added Harvick.
Busch’s underperforming car keeps him on the edge, temperamentally, added Harvick. “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,” he explained.
The incident with Larson was almost identical to one 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 thought he could push his elder sibling around. It put both drivers out of the race.
For the record, Kurt finished 19th and Kyle 20th in the 21-driver All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway in 2007. And ironically, Harvick wound up winning that race and the cool $1 million.
Busch: ‘I should have learned my lesson’ (back then)
While the replay still looks like it was him who caused the crash with his elder brother, 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 said. “We both made mistakes in that race, but we certainly came out on the worst end of it.”
You’d think ‘Rowdy’ Busch might have learned his lesson after that wreck. But given that it was 17 years before 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.
