It was just after 12:30 p.m. Tuesday at Clifford J. Lawrence Junior High School. Kyle T. Busch, originally of Las Vegas, now of a compound on a lake near Charlotte, N.C. — aka “your 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion” — was having his ear bent by a school district trustee in the hallway outside Stacy Schaumburg’s STEM classroom.
The bartender looked at me in a bewildered fashion, as if I had just dropped in from Neptune or somewhere. This was Sunday, at Victory’s Bar & Grill at the Cannery on Craig Road.
Ken Schrader is what you would call a racer’s racer. To use NASCAR chairman Brian France’s favorite word, he just might be the quintessential example of it, now that A.J. Foyt has turned 80 and has too many health problems to drive much of anything, except for maybe a tractor on his ranch.
In its quest to remain relevant during football season, NASCAR foisted a playoff system upon the public. Now it has foisted drivers smacking into one another on the track upon the public, and the handing down of dramatic penalties.
He’s the only local driver in Saturday night’s NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. So if Spencer Gallagher can keep his nose clean, as the auto racing announcers like to say, and he is running near the front toward the end, the Fox Sports 1 and Motor Racing Network broadcast crews will be inclined to mention his home track advantage.
Kyle Busch made it official on Tuesday morning, that he’s returning to NASCAR sooner than expected after suffering a compound fracture to his right leg and breaking his left foot during a grinding crash the day before the Daytona 500 in February.
On the same day investigative findings about the Patriots under-inflating footballs were disclosed and everybody went nuts, NASCAR, as only coincidence would dictate, rendered a final ruling about one of its top teams under-inflating tires. Exactly nobody went nuts.
With no competition yellow flags or pickup trucks with mud flaps and big No. 3 decals on back to slow me down, I was able to spend 6 hours, 4 minutes taking in the sights and sounds of NASCAR Race Day.
They tried it the other way. They sat down with him and the sponsors and everyone else with a say in the matter before the 2012 season and agreed to back off. They did what Kyle Busch would regard as sacrilegious. They asked him to race less.
A couple of years ago in this space I wrote about David Gilliland, one of the back-of-the-pack NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers for whom I’ve always had admiration and affinity.
