Kyle Busch will make NASCAR national series start 1000th on Sunday when he takes the green flag for the STP 500 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Martinsville Speedway. Race 1000 comes a day after 999, as he also contested the TruNorth Global 250 NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series race, also at Martinsville.
Busch's milestone start also comes just a week after he grabbed a milestone NASCAR race win. His win of the Auto Club 400 Cup Series race at Auto Club Speedway on March 17 was his 200th across all three of NASCAR's national series. He scored the 201st in Saturday's Truck Series race at Martinsville.
“I think the original goal was just to get to NASCAR, and then, once I got here, it was to win a race,” Busch said. "Once I won a race, then it was about trying to sustain and being able to be a winner here and to be a champion here, to have the opportunities to continue down the line, to be able to be successful each and every year, and we’ve been doing that. We’ve only won one title, but certainly I feel like I have the best team out there right now and we just have to be able to do it all year long.”
Busch claimed his Cup Series title in 2015 after missing the first 11 races of the season, sidelined by injuries sustained in the Xfinity Series season opener at Daytona International Speedway.
In his first 999 national races, Busch’s winning percentage over all three series is just over 20 percent, with a personal best single-series winning percentage of 36 in the Truck Series. To this point in his career, he wins just over 10 percent of the Cup Series races he contests.
Busch is in his 15th season of full-time competition in the Cup Series, and he also continues to run partial schedules in the Xfinity and Truck series. After six Truck Series starts for Roush Fenway Racing in 2001, Busch was sidelined by a change in NASCAR's minimum age requirement until 2003 when he joined Hendrick Motorsports. He joined Joe Gibbs Racing in 2008 and has been there ever since. His Xfinity Series efforts also are with JGR, while he fields his own Truck Series entries through his Kyle Busch Motorsports.
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