On Oct. 15, Kurt Busch announced he would not be running full time in the NASCAR Cup Series in 2023 in a press conference at his hometown Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
No one took the news harder than Busch himself, as he choked up explaining the news to onlookers in the media center. 2023 will be the first season without Busch running full time — or at least intending to — since 2000.
The news specified just a move away from full-time competition in 2023, but there’s a real possibility this might be it for him in terms of 36-race seasons.
Every driver has a fire to compete and win, and there will come a day where every elite driver has to call it a career. But given that competitive fire, everyone wants to exit on their own terms; no one wants to go out like this.
Busch’s 2022 season came to an abrupt halt after he was diagnosed with concussion-like symptoms following a July 23 qualifying crash at Pocono Raceway, and he has yet to be cleared for racing nearly five months later. But make no mistake, Busch wants to be back. And if he is cleared for 2023, he has announced his intentions to run a part-time schedule with 23XI Racing.
Read all of Frontstretch‘s content looking back on 2022 here
Before an abrupt end to the 2022 season after 20 races, Busch’s highlight of the year was a dominating win at Kansas Speedway on May 15. It was his first victory at the track, the 34th of his career and the first win for 23XI in a race that went the full distance.
But even that doesn’t encapsulate how monumental of a win it was. Upon taking the checkered flag, Busch became the first driver to win a Cup race for Ford, Dodge, Chevrolet and Toyota, the prominent manufacturers of 21st-century NASCAR. And by virtue of winning in May 2022, Busch became just one of eight drivers in Cup history to have a 20-year span of wins, as his Kansas triumph came 20 years and 52 days after his maiden Cup win at Bristol Motor Speedway on March 24, 2002.
23XI marked the fifth team he had won a Cup race with, and of all the drivers to make their Cup debut after the beginning of the series’ modern era in 1972, only Ricky Rudd won for more teams (six) than Busch.
In many ways, the two drivers shared numerous similarities throughout their careers. Rudd never scored more than two wins in a single season, but he was a winning threat for nearly two decades. From 1983 to 2002, Rudd scored 23 wins across a span of 20 seasons; he won at least one race in 18 of the 20.
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