Kurt Busch Looks Back on His 'Second-Best Chance' to Win a NASCAR Cup Championship With Tony Stewart

Kurt Busch was like a tornado early in his NASCAR career. The Las Vegas native was racing Legends cars at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway Bullring in 1999, and a year later, after several months in the Truck Series — he’d win four times and finish second in the championship — Busch would also make his Cup debut in 2000.

In 2002, he would finish third in the Cup championship, and two years after that, he won the Cup championship for what was then Roush Racing (now Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing).

Observers predicted Busch would win several more Cup crowns, but unfortunately he never did. He did, though, win 34 Cup races in total. However, in the closing stages of his career, he appeared ready to win a second Cup crown, this time with Stewart-Haas Racing.

2016 was Tony Stewart’s final season as a driver, and besides Busch, SHR also had Danica Patrick and Kevin Harvick. Busch won at Pocono that year, as well as nine top-five and 21 top-10 finishes, ultimately finishing seventh in the standings, the top finisher in the SHR lineup, one spot above Harvick.

He had Tony Gibson on the pit box as crew chief from 2015 through 2017 and the duo worked very well together, including Gibson helping Busch to win the biggest race in NASCAR, the 2017 Daytona 500.

Busch was quite candid when SpakeUp podcast host Shannon Spake asked him if he had a favorite team to pick from all the various organizations he raced for.

“I was thinking like Tony Gibson and that whole group at Stewart-Haas,” Busch told Spake. “I felt like that should have been a championship over there.

“Harvick was our teammate and with (Clint) Bowyer, Danica and Stewart was still driving. That (2016) was like my second-best chance, I thought, to win a championship and Tony Gibson just made it fun.”

From seventh in 2016 to winning the Great American Race in 2017

Even though Busch came up short in winning the title that year, the Daytona 500 win to start the following season was one the soon-to-be NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee will never forget, not just the victory but also the way Gibson was so emotional and happy to finally win the Great American Race.

“(Gibson) was so good at restrictor plate stuff,” Busch said. “He lost it, like he just lost his soul in that whole moment. That was a huge win for us.

“I felt like that era should have provided more wins. We were just consistent, we chiseled away and we had fun. We had fun outside the track as well.”