Do you feel that? That is the momentum building for the 2023 edition of NASCAR silly season.
Silly season unofficially kicked off a little over a month ago when Kyle Busch stirred the pot (not the media, but Busch himself) with comments about how his contract renewal with Joe Gibbs Racing wasn’t done yet. And now we wait for the first actual domino to fall, and that’ll mark the official start of silly season.
I wrote in April that Busch and Stewart-Haas Racing’s No. 10 car (Aric Almirola is stepping away from full-time competition) would be the first dominoes to fall that would give way for all the other pieces to start falling into place.
In a way, it seems like the Busch situation has sort of been resolved. It always seemed like a stretch that he would even leave JGR. And recent comments from Joe Gibbs and Toyota make it seem they are deeply committed to bringing Busch back and that JGR is close to landing sponsorship for the No. 18. After all, if Busch left, they would not only lose the most decorated active NASCAR Cup Series driver, but they would also lose a key piece in their driver development program in Kyle Busch Motorsports.
Of course, until pen actually hits paper, there’s always the possibility things could fall apart, but Busch no longer seems like the biggest silly season piece. It has since become his JGR teammate Martin Truex Jr.
Truex still doesn’t know if he wants to race next year or not.
“I think about it every day,” Truex said. “We’re working on it. I should know something soon. I’m taking it all into account — my whole life, all of racing, everything.
” … It’s a big decision and a lot of factors. I would say within a couple of weeks, you guys will know what I’m doing.”
I’ve always viewed Truex as the Ricky Rudd type, where he retires without any sort of farewell tour and then is just gone — you never see him again. He has nothing to prove and is in a rare situation where he will get to go out on his…
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