Kyle Busch Brings The Noise In Atlanta!

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

Hendrick Motorsports must’ve been crazy to kick Kyle Busch to the curb. As you may know, the preeminent NASCAR Sprint Cup Series team dropped Busch in order to pick up Dale Earnhardt Jr. for the 2008 season as Junior fled his former team, DEI. The orphaned Busch brother was soon picked up by Joe Gibbs Racing, and meanwhile Gibbs was bought out by Toyota. Today, this sequence of events has at last paid dividends all around as Kyle, at 22, became the youngest driver ever to win a Sprint Cup race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, and the first since 1954 to drive a foreign make into victory circle. The win was a huge relief for Toyota, whose controversial move into Sprint Cup racing last year, and its longstanding inability to prove itself to be truly competitive in NASCAR’s top series despite sinking untold bucketloads of cash into its NASCAR effort, was starting to become a bit of an embarrassment. Now it’s clear that Joe Gibbs has scooped up the right driver and Toyota has bought the right team—congrats all around! Poor Rick Hendrick must be just kicking himself right now, but he should be biding his time: new acquisition Junior’s performance has been trending upward in the early races of this season, and by all accounts he’s poised to make a major comeback in ’08.