Race day. There was a wonderful photo taken a few years ago of Dario Franchitti, Tony Kanaan and others — drivers with about a million combined Indy 500 starts between them — sitting in the green room on race morning. They’re together but alone, each driver in quiet contemplation of what the next few hours will bring. Busch could relate.
“Sunday morning, with 300,000 people there and cameras, sponsors, just the pageantry of it all, I had to block that out,” he says. “I had to get into race mode and I didn’t take in the whole atmosphere on race day morning because I said, ‘I have to be a professional and I have to be a race car driver right now.’
“With running Daytona for so many years and running the Brickyard [400], that’s just like putting on an old pair of jeans. But that morning of the Indy 500 was a whole different ball of wax. It felt like I was a rookie again at my first Daytona 500. And so that’s where I had to use those years of experience to block out the emotions.”
Green flag.
“I felt comfortable… probably around lap 50 of the race,” Busch chuckles. “It took until then until I got the adrenaline calmed down, and when I got to lap 100, I took another tool out of my toolbox and said, ‘All right, you’re about done learning. Apply everything you have now.’ And that’s when I was able to start moving up.”
Helping Busch’s cause was the fact that the entire first half of the race was run under green flag conditions, which spared him from having to grapple with restarts and gave him the bandwidth to focus on things like fuel burn-off, tire wear and remembering fundamentals like resetting his adjustments after each pit stop. The pit stops, too, were sharp.
“Next thing you know, we’re running ninth, and that was way better than I expected,” Busch says. “And then you want more. You want to find other things to do to pass cars or to block others. I got lucky with a couple other guys having some trouble, and that helped us move up to sixth.”
The one nervous moment came after lap 191, when Townsend Bell crashed heavily in Turn 2 and brought out a red flag. It took 11 minutes for the track workers to clean up the debris and repair the barrier, which was 11 minutes that Busch didn’t have.
“It was a little awkward thinking that I was going to be late for the Coke 600,” he says. “But at the same time, I just made my way through all of that shrapnel and debris from Townsend Bell’s wreck, and luckily I didn’t have a tire puncture. Here I am sitting sixth, and I said, ‘If I get a strong restart and get a run, I’ve got a chance here to work my way into the top three.’ I tried to pass Juan Pablo Montoya on the outside of Turn 1 with about four laps to go and watched him put a huge block on me. I was like, ‘You know what? I’m pretty good here. I’m about ready to finish sixth. I don’t need to be in the marbles to be wrecked.’ He was elbows out, ready for me.
“I remember taking the checkered and hopping up out of the cockpit, and it was a reason to celebrate. It was a huge moral victory in a sense. We did, I think, one interview, and the next thing you know, I’m in the helicopter headed to Charlotte. And that’s where you have to, again, put the blinders on, put the race mindset back into the focus of the 600.”
“I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a pretty good result,’” Hampson says. “From where we were with having crashed the car on Monday and a driver who’s never done this before, I felt really good about that.
“You always want to finish higher, but I really do think where we finished, that was about the best I could have hoped for. I came away from the month with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, and he did a fantastic job.
“Then of course we watched the Charlotte race that evening; we’re like, ‘That’s our guy. We’re cheering for him now.’ It was a super-cool experience. I have stayed in touch with Kurt — we text every now and then. I obviously was in touch with him after his concussion problems. I saw him at Nashville last year. It was a very nice experience for me, and it was great to get to know him.”
“That evening, after we broke a valve spring and didn’t get to finish the Coca-Cola 600, I still felt like I had enough energy to run another race,” Busch says. “The adrenaline of it all settled over the next few weeks. And the people reaching out congratulating me, the team… it lasted quite a long time.
“One funny story is, I went back up to Indy for the banquet and the celebration where they hand out the checks, and it’s a nice dinner. And when I got my chance to speak as Rookie of the Year, I said, ‘Yeah, last week when we ran the race…’ and it just slipped out like that. That’s what it felt like, like a week just had gone by. So everybody’s laughing and I’m like, ‘Oh, it was yesterday.’”
There was talk at the time that Busch might come back for another swing at the double in 2015.
“It was close,” Busch says. “It all would’ve worked out again. It was just a matter of some of the main sponsors wanting to be involved, and the ROI was huge. The amount of social media posts, media… it was all worth it to do it again. It’s just that that full effort does take away quite a bit of focus from the Cup car. And that’s where I just settled back in and said, ‘You know what, I’m a NASCAR guy and I want to try to get a second championship over here.’
“And I would say that one of my best years in NASCAR Cup racing was 2015. It was the year after, because I used all of that same mentality and preparation and structure to make a run in 2015, and in NASCAR it was one of my best years.”
Hampson suspects that had Busch returned, he may well have found himself brushing up against a glass ceiling. Getting within striking range of the establishment, as Busch did in 2014 is one thing, but that first 98 percent is the easy-ish part. If you want to find what separates the good from the great in IndyCar, you have to look in the margins.
“The question is, are you coming back and going to be able to win?” Hampson says. “Because if you come back for a second year, now the expectation is you’re going to contend for the victory; otherwise, what’s the point? And then the open question is, can you contend for the win if you aren’t doing this week in, week out? Just all the details about starts and restarts, the pit entry and the pit exit… that’s always the hard part, right? As you get up into the thin air, all the little bits are that much harder to achieve.
“Clearly a fast car makes a big difference, but I don’t know if we could have topped a sixth place. There’s a lot of factors that come in. Do you have the right engine that year? Have you made good advancements on your setup over the winter? Has another team pulled forward of your guys? It’s never an automatic around this place.”
Busch retired from competition last year. Freed from the constant push to look ahead to the next race, he now has an opportunity to look back and appreciate the journey.
“Indy was a career top-five moment,” he says. “It was a mental and spiritual adventure to push myself to do something that unique and different. To have won a championship in NASCAR, to have won Daytona [in 2017], to have qualified an NHRA Pro Stock car at the Gatornationals… there’s those top five-type moments. And Indy will forever be one of those special ones where it was a sixth-place finish, but it was my one and only IndyCar start, and it turned out to be a beautiful result.”