The maiden race of the 2024 Craftsman Truck Series season has cast many eyes on the lack of professionalism in the lower rungs of NASCAR. With talks of the unethical wrecks that went down at Daytona last weekend gaining traction by the day, two-time Cup Series champion Kyle Busch was asked about the state of things in the third tier in his pre-race media availability at Atlanta. He had a rather positive take on things.
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Getting into the speed fresh from the sale of his Truck Series outfit, Busch believes that NASCAR, in general, is healthy and strong. Citing the multi-billion dollar deals that were getting closed in the Cup Series and the influx of wealthy sponsors, he reiterated that all the rain in the top tier would eventually trickle down to Xfinity and Truck.
He said, “Would I say that there are ‘Fortune 500’ companies that are all out here participating in our sport? No, there’s not. So the sponsorship landscape is absolutely the toughest landscape in our sport, but I don’t know that’s any different than what it was in the high time in the mid-90s to the mid-2000s.”
Busch’s words of confidence that the sport is moving ahead in the right direction is an optimistic sign of things. Hopefully, the unfavorable winds that cloud the lower tiers will flow by fast and bring about a healthier outlook from sponsors and team owners as they did in the Cup Series.
Kyle Busch claims that the fuel-saving strategies employed at Daytona were “disgraceful”
Another key point that emerged out of the Daytona International Speedway last weekend was the fuel-saving strategies that Cup Series teams used to race. Drivers were found at half-throttle at certain points in a bid to save fuel and quicken their pitstops. While Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Denny Hamlin have already come out on their podcasts to criticize the move, Busch has now jumped on the bandwagon too.
He said, “We were all sitting around there running half-throttle; not passing, and just riding in a line. I felt disgraceful, myself, being a race car driver – wanting to go fast, lead laps and win the Daytona 500, and that was our strategy that we had to employ at the start of the race because everybody was doing it.”
Being a race car driver, it is understandable why purposefully running at half-speeds could be frustrating for Busch. But that was the strategy that it took to win the 2024 Daytona 500. Elton Sawyer, the VP of Competition at NASCAR, has promised that the promotion will be scrutinizing the strategy but a solution, for now, is vague at best.
