NBC Sports posted an interesting ‘what if?’ this week when it posed this question: In their respective prime, who would win in a head-to-head matchup at Bristol: Kyle Busch or Dale Earnhardt?
Busch promptly replied, “Neither one of us would see the checkered.” That was food for fodder here as we were thinking of topics for this week.
Andrew Stoddard and Joy Tomlinson this week tackle the age old question: KFB vs The Intimidator in Thunder Valley.
Rowdy Would Reign at Bristol
When looking at this match up on paper, it looks like the Intimidator has the slight edge, with nine wins to Busch’s eight and an average finish of 9.3 to Busch’s 13.9. But if you look beyond the raw numbers, Rowdy’s Bristol resume has a lot going for it.
While Earnhardt had a handle on The World’s Fastest Half-Mile, there is a lot more variety in Busch’s Bristol victories. Rowdy has won there in the Car of Tomorrow and the Gen 6 car, and he also has a win on dirt with the Next Gen car. All three of those cars feature considerably different aerodynamic and rules packages that have forced veteran drivers like Busch to adapt and adjust their driving style over the years.
Busch has been a prolific winner at Bristol across all three of NASCAR’s national touring series. In addition to his eight Cup Series checkered flags, Rowdy also owns nine NASCAR Xfinity Series wins and five NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series victories at The Last Great Colosseum. Furthermore, only KFB can boast of sweeping all three series in a single race weekend, and he has done it twice at Bristol. Busch’s 2010 and 2017 Bristol August weekends ranks among some of the most dominant displays of driving in NASCAR history.
Busch has even won on a variety of surfaces at Bristol. Along with seven wins on the regular concrete oval, Busch is one of only three Bristol Cup Series winners on dirt. Furthermore, all of Busch’s Bristol accomplishments came in arguably a more competitive and parity-filled era of NASCAR Cup Series racing. In his prime, Earnhardt really had just two chief rivals at Bristol: Darrell Waltrip, the winningest driver at Bristol with 12 checkered flags, and Rusty Wallace, who equaled Earnhardt with nine wins.
In Busch’s time, there has been a much bigger pool of drivers with the potential to put a hurting on the field at Bristol. You’ve got his bigger brother Kurt Busch with six wins, Jeff Gordon winning five times, and Carl Edwards and Matt…
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