HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Kyle Busch couldn’t help but make a sarcastic joke.
“Oh, I won a full-time championship? What do you know?” he said after winning the second NASCAR Cup Series championship of his career Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Busch earned his first title in 2015, but his biggest critics in NASCAR’s fan base said he was not worthy of winning and still question the legitimacy of it because he missed the first 11 races of that Cup season after breaking his right leg and fracturing his left foot in a wreck during the closing laps of the season-opening second-tier XFINITY Series race at Daytona International Speedway.
He didn’t compete in nearly a third of the 2015 season, but NASCAR granted him a waiver allowing him to still be championship eligible. And then he won it all.
“This is great because that always did bother Kyle a little bit,” Samantha Busch, Kyle’s wife, told For The Win and two other media outlets Sunday as the family celebrated his second title. “People were like, ‘That wasn’t real. You didn’t run all the races. It doesn’t count.’ So, now what? He ran all the races this year. He was the regular season’s points champion. …
“It always had a little star by it, I think, for him, so I think this one’s going to take time to set in, and he’s gonna know he did it.”
Busch and the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota team not only won the 2019 title, but they also won the Ford EcoBoost 400 when they only had to finish higher than the other championship hopefuls. Martin Truex Jr. finished second, while Kevin Harvick was fourth and Denny Hamlin 10th.
This season, Busch competed in all 36 races and won five. But there are still some peculiar similarities to his 2015 championship run, specifically his winless streaks leading up to victories at Homestead. It all feels “awfully familiar,” he said.
Five years ago after Busch returned from his injuries, he won four-of-five races between June and July, and then he went on a 15-race winless streak until he took the checkered flag in the championship race. Getting off to a comparably hot start, though healthy, he won three-of-five early on — including his 200th win across NASCAR’s three national series — a fourth in June and then rode a 21-race winless streak into Homestead.
“It felt a lot like 2015 to me, aside from the broken leg, obviously,” crew chief Adam Stevens said.
“[We] had a couple races get away from us,” he said, comparing the two championship seasons. “But it wasn’t because we weren’t fast. It wasn’t because we weren’t prepared. They just didn’t go our way.”
— Kyle Busch (@KyleBusch) November 17, 2019
Despite being one of the most talented drivers on the track, the winless streak led to Busch being perceived as the underdog against Truex, Hamlin and Harvick, who all won at least one playoff race.
In another similarity to 2015, Samantha said people overlooked her husband in both championship seasons, first because he missed so many races and then because he went more than five months without a trip to Victory Lane.
“You know Kyle likes to prove people wrong,” she said. “I think he took that, internalized it [and] used it to fuel him instead of bring him back.”
A second career championship elevates Busch’s resume to another elite level. He joins seven-time champ Jimmie Johnson as the only active driver with more than one title. He now has 56 career wins, moving him into ninth on the all-time wins list.
This season and its championship finish “certainly reminded” Busch of his 2015 run, he said with a chuckle. Only this time, no one can question it.
“This one feels like the first,” he said. “But getting into next year being two-time is going to be cool. I’m certainly looking forward to that.”
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