NASCAR Cup Series

I'm impressed

Published Aug. 23, 2010 1:00 a.m. ET

Darrell Waltrip

We all know how hard it is to win at Bristol Motor Speedway. Trust me, I know. There was even a time when yours truly was unbeatable there. I rate my seven Cup wins in a row at Bristol right next to winning the Daytona 500. It’s something me and my team worked very hard on and even 26 years later are still very proud of.

We all know the pitfalls of Bristol being a fast, high-banked, half-mile track. It’s a tough racetrack. It’s tough to stay out of trouble there and it’s tough to survive. So I am impressed when anyone can win there. I am really impressed if they can win more than one race there and then I am super impressed if they can win multiple times there.

So naturally I have been getting a lot of questions via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, etc., asking me about what Kyle Busch accomplished last week winning the Truck, Nationwide and Sprint Cup races at Bristol last week.

To me, Kyle Busch is in a league of his own. Obviously the most impressive thing to me is he did it with three different vehicles. Let’s face it, a truck doesn’t drive anything like a Nationwide car and a Nationwide car doesn’t drive anything like a Cup car. He also did it with three different crew chiefs.

So for him to jump out of one and into the other and win three times last week at the same tough track is truly impressive to me.

Back in the day, most of us would do double-duty by running our Nationwide car on Saturday and then back that up with the Cup car on Sunday. Now at Bristol, in particular, that was pretty demanding on you physically when you consider you would run a couple hundred laps one day and then 500 laps the next. By the end of the 500 laps, you were dog-gone pretty used up.

Folks, I will admit there are some things that Kyle does that aggravate and irritate people, but you can’t overlook and simply be impressed with what he did last week. Dale Earnhardt liked to irritate people. He liked to bump you on the track and get you mad. That was just the game he liked to play.

Kyle has a lot of that in him.

He’s a feisty guy. You rough him up, well you can count on that he is going to rough you up, too. I like that. Hey, what if there were 43 Kyle Busch’s out there? What if there were 43 take-no-prisoners kind of guys that all they had on their mind was winning and believed second place sucked?

See that’s Kyle Busch and that’s the approach he takes. No matter what type of vehicle he climbs into, he expects to win. He has a rap of being hard on his crew and harsh to them. I had that same rap attached to me at one time. I just wanted to motivate my team to give 100 percent and be as passionate about winning as I was.

Golly, I about fell out of my chair Friday night after Kyle won the race and got out of his car and was rubbing his eyes like he was crying. Back in the day, guys might have tried to come up with a story about what happened between he and a competitor on the track just to soften things to the media and the fans.

Not Kyle. He gets out and says “I dumped him.” That’s classic Kyle. Man that made my jaw drop. Geez, maybe you should be a little more subtle about it, son. Maybe he shouldn’t be so blunt, but that’s just who he is. That’s the kind of driver he is and that’s the kind of person he is.

The other thing about Kyle is he is a student of the sport. He’s a really intelligent guy. His mind is always working. When he saw Jamie McMurray was going to pit in the Cup race, Kyle called into his crew and called his own pit stop. He came from about one second back of Jamie, caught him, passed him getting down pit road and beat him off of pit road by a second or two.

My point is he is so savvy that he knew he had to get tires with McMurray because at the time, Jamie might have had the better car. It just shows you how sharp he is. He is sharp on the chassis, he is sharp on the strategy and he is certainly as sharp as there has ever been behind the wheel.

Now listen to me a second – you can love, hate him, wish he would go away and wish he would never win another race, but folks, he is good for our sport. We need drivers like Kyle Busch in our sport. We need guys like him out there that care about one thing and one thing only – winning that race. The way he races is win at all costs.

How can you not be impressed about what this young man is doing at such a young age? Folks, realize that he set a NASCAR record last week. He wrote himself right into the NASCAR record books by winning all three of NASCAR’s major touring series at the same track in the same week. No one, and I mean no one, has ever done that before. Dale never did it. I never did. Petty, Pearson, Rusty, Bobby – all of them never did it. Kyle Busch did and he did at Bristol, of all places.

That is nothing but impressive.

Now there were some other really cool things that happened at Bristol. Did you watch the Motor Racing Outreach kids sing the national anthem? What a wonderful performance that was by those little kids. You could certainly see and feel how heartfelt it was and how hard they worked on it. That was a special moment for me even before the cars even cranked Saturday evening.

The other special moment for me was to hear Brian Vickers say that his physical problems have been corrected by the doctors and he will be back in a Cup car next year. I have always thought a lot of Brian because he is a quality guy. I hated that he had to go through what he did, but thank the Lord they caught it before things got worse.

It was sad to not see Bristol track president Jeff Byrd there Saturday night. Stevie and I have known Jeff and his family from back in the R.J. Reynolds days. Jeff continues to battle a very serious medical condition and we all pray that God will bring a miracle to Jeff’s life. We pray he will be healed and be able to get back to doing what he loves to do – running Bristol Motor Speedway like no other.

I was also impressed by the crowd Saturday night. The joint was almost full. I saw very few empty seats. The place holds 165,000 people so it had to have been about 155,000 there, so that was great for the folks at Bristol. It was a decent race with lots of side-by-side racing back in the pack.

A couple of folks have asked me why the Truck race and the Nationwide race seemed a little more exciting. It’s all about time. On a short track, especially, there is less time to get things done and make things happen. You have to get it done and get it done in a hurry. You don’t have much strategy in a 250-lap race at Bristol – it’s flat out, as hard as you can go every lap.

The difference come Saturday night is you have to have strategy. It’s a 500-mile race at a high banked half-mile. You have to take care of your stuff. They don’t race quite as hard and quite as aggressive early on. It’s just the nature of that 500-mile race.

My final two thoughts have to do with Dale Earnhardt Jr. I was glad to see him run the Nationwide and the Cup race at Bristol. Seat time is valuable to any driver and I just think it does a lot for his confidence when he drives that Nationwide car. The other thing that both Stevie and I were so happy to see was that he shaved. Now my wife loves Dale Jr. to death – always has just like she did his Daddy. She made the comment to me Saturday that she loved the fact that he shaved because she could see his sweet face again. I thought that was kind of special that he finally did that.