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Is Kyle Busch chasing Richard Petty's record or simply 200 wins?

Kyle Busch’s win at Phoenix on Sunday was the 194th victory of his NASCAR career. Is he six wins shy of tying Richard Petty’s record for 200 NASCAR wins?

Probably not. Busch’s 194 wins have come across NASCAR’s Cup Series, Xfinity Series and Truck Series. As longtime NASCAR fans and staunch Petty loyalists will remind you, all of Petty’s came in what’s now known as the Cup Series; NASCAR’s highest level.

Things have changed a ton since Petty was beating people in the 1960s and 1970s to the 2000s as Busch has gobbled up wins at a pace unseen in modern NASCAR. Petty’s record is the gold standard and it’s highly unlikely that anyone in our lifetimes will come close to 200 Cup Series wins. Just eight drivers have more than 75 Cup Series wins and only two active drivers — Busch and Jimmie Johnson — have more than 50.

But that doesn’t mean what Busch is doing isn’t remarkable in its own right. He’s adding to the greatest win total in modern NASCAR. If you ask him, it was all part of the plan. Even if he’s not a big fan of talking about the historic impact of his win total while he’s still driving.

“I’d like to think I’ve got a long ways to go, you know,” Busch, 33, told Yahoo Sports days after he won race No. 193 at Richmond in September. “So anytime people ask me about ‘Well you made it to 50’ and ‘Oh well you made it to 193,’ it’s like well, you keep asking me about things you should be asking me about when I’m retiring and not where I’m at.”

“It’s obviously great right now but there’s a long way to go. If I continue to keep getting asked those questions — I mean I plan to win 100 Cup Series races and over 250 national series races — so if you ask me every single time it’s going to get old.”

NBC analyst Kyle Petty, Richard’s son, thinks Busch’s torrid win pace and the current NASCAR climate have spawned the comparisons between Busch’s chase and Petty’s accomplishment.

“Mark [Martin] had obviously a lot of Xfinity wins but nobody ever really combined Mark’s Xfiinity and his Cup and said OK he’s got 90 wins total,” Petty told Yahoo Sports in October. Martin has 40 Cup wins and 49 Xfinity Series wins. “Nobody ever said that. It was always kept separate. But when Kyle got close to 100 it became a new category for NASCAR. And it’s an impressive category. And Kyle Busch, what Kyle Busch has done is pretty special. By anybody’s standards.”

Petty’s a firm believer that the two accomplishments can’t be compared. But as Busch gets closer and closer to 200 NASCAR wins, those comparisons are going to be unavoidable. Even if they’re indirect at best and unfair at worst.

With those future discussions in mind, let’s take a look at the career achievements of Petty and Busch to show just how different they are.

Breaking down Petty’s 200

200 wins in 1,184 starts
Won final Cup Series race in 915th start

• As we noted above, all of Petty’s wins came at NASCAR’s top level. What’s now known as the Xfinity Series wasn’t formed until 1982 and the Truck Series didn’t come along until 1995, three years after Petty retired from the sport. He never made an Xfinity Series start either.

The seven-time champion is considered by many to be the greatest NASCAR driver of all-time. He dominated the series like no one ever has and likely ever will. Petty won 27 of 48 races in 1967 on the way to his second championship and won 21 of 46 races in 1971 for championship number three.
In the three seasons in between, Petty had 44 wins as David Pearson won two of his three championships and Bobby Isaac won in 1970.

Pearson is the only other driver with more than 100 Cup Series wins and his total of 105 looks paltry compared to Petty’s 200 (even if Pearson defenders will note his better winning percentage). No one is going to come close to getting 200 Cup Series wins.

“And to say 200 total wins or 250 total wins or 100 total wins, that’s a big deal,” Kyle Petty said. “That really is. I guess for me, and I’m a little biased because of my dad, but Pearson’s wins and [Darrell Waltrip’s] wins and Bobby Allison’s wins and [Cale Yarborough’s] wins to me are more impressive than 200 over three series.”

“I will put it to you this way. Because Cup is the major one. I’m going to give you the Kyle Petty smartass response. This is the big leagues and little league stats don’t count in the majors.”

• Petty has seven championships, tied with Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson for the most of anyone. If Busch wins the title Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway he’ll have two.

• One of the biggest transformations the Cup Series has undergone from Petty’s heyday to Busch’s is the transition from a series filled with drivers who owned their own teams to multi-car teams where owner-drivers are a rarity. Until Tony Stewart won the 2011 title while piloting a car he co-owned, the last owner-driver champion in NASCAR was 1992 Cup Series champion Alan Kulwicki.

Many of Busch’s Truck Series wins have come for his own team, Kyle Busch Motorsports. But nearly all of Petty’s Cup wins have come while he drove for his family team. Petty got 198 of his 200 victories while driving for Petty Enterprises and had multiple wins in which he lapped the field. There were days when Petty didn’t just win a race, he whipped the field in the process. Domination in your family team’s equipment is worth something, isn’t it?

• Going back to the first point in this section, Petty didn’t have close to the same opportunities that Busch has had through his career to run multiple NASCAR races in a weekend throughout an entire season. Busch has come through NASCAR in an era where either the Truck Series or Xfinity Series runs the day before the Cup Series does at a track and has posted three wins in a weekend at Bristol.*

“The consolidation of the sport has made this category possible,” Kyle Petty said when talking about Busch’s wins over all three series. “And as long as we have the consolidation of the sport in the same place, on the same weekends at the same time, I do think we need to keep up with it. I do think it needs to be a category. I’m behind it 100 percent. I’ll never be behind comparing them.”

Petty did have a season where he competed in over 60 races, but the NASCAR schedule went from 48 races to 31 in 1972, the season that’s typically referred to as the first in the modern era.

Petty’s win percentage is also better than Busch’s anyway. With Petty’s 200th win coming in his 915th race, it took him fewer tries to get to 200 than it took Busch to get to 194.

*Petty won a Convertible Series race in 1959, unofficially pushing his total NASCAR win total to 201. But Petty’s list of Cup Series wins also includes a qualifying race for the Coca-Cola 600. So we’re just calling it a wash and sticking with 200.

Breaking down Busch’s 194

194 wins in 987 starts
51 Cup wins, 92 Xfinity wins, 51 Truck wins

• While Busch ranks 11th on the all-time Cup Series wins list, he has the most wins of anyone in Xfinity Series history and is tied with Ron Hornaday for the most Truck Series wins. He’s got a chance to be in the top five among all Cup Series drivers while at the top of the other two series when he retires from NASCAR.

There’s no disputing that both the Xfinity Series and Truck Series are steps below the Cup Series. But it’s not clear just how big of a step down they are given that Cup Series drivers have been able to freely compete in either series. Many of Busch’s lower-level wins have come against fields that include multiple Cup drivers.

Busch won 13 Xfinity Series races in 29 starts in 2010. They all came in fields that included Brad Keselowski and Carl Edwards. Ten of those wins came in races that also included Kevin Harvick. A 40-car race with four potential NASCAR Hall of Famers is a stout field. You can make the argument it is more stout than, for example, the 1962 Starkey Speedway race Petty won that had a 16-car field with Ned Jarrett and Joe Weatherly.

• Competition and ability improve as a series or sport ages. Take a look at baseball, where the average fastball velocity has risen over three miles per hour in the last 15 seasons. The hard throwers of 2018 didn’t exist in 1958.

Let’s move that over to auto racing. As NASCAR and auto racing have grown over the last 50 years, the drivers have likely gotten better and the technology and equipment has undoubtedly gotten better. The engineering in the Truck Series is light years ahead of what teams were doing to their stock cars in the 1960s.

Back in Petty’s day it was routine for numerous cars to retire before the end of a race because they simply couldn’t get to the end of the race. That’s not nearly as common now as reliability issues get more and more scarce. Simply having a car that will make it to the end of the race is not the golden ticket that it used to be.

The field is also much closer together and will continue to get closer thanks to NASCAR’s new rules to bunch up the field at intermediate tracks in 2019. With debris cautions due to pop up at any moment before the era of stage racing and stage racing introducing two pre-planned cautions into each race along with the era of the wave-around and the free pass rules for cars a lap down, it’s hard to put your competitors in the dust.

That closer field means less margin for error. It’s nearly impossible to lap the field. Little mistakes get magnified in today’s NASCAR, even if the rules structure also means its easier to rebound from a mistake that would previously be race-killing. Busch is succeeding as NASCAR structures its races to minimize blowouts.

• Busch’s young age plays a big role in the discussion surrounding his 194 wins. He won his first NASCAR race at the age of 20, an age almost three years younger than Petty when he won his first. Petty won his last race two days after turning 47 and a driver’s peak typically happens in his mid-to-late 30s. The best racing of Busch’s career is yet to come, meaning that goal of 250 wins he’s set for himself is eminently achievable, even if NASCAR continues to throttle his opportunities.

That limiting of opportunities is going to depress Busch’s win total. His lower-series success and the unhappiness that comes with it has helped lead NASCAR to cut the number of Truck and Xfinity races that Cup Series drivers can compete in. After winning 10 of 17 Xfinity Series races in 2016, Busch has driven in just 17 Xfinity Series races in each of the last two seasons.

Even though Busch’s win accumulation is going to slow down, the idea that his career has 15 good years left makes it possible to think he’ll soar toward 250 wins. Most of those additional wins would be Cup wins too, meaning he has a chance to approach Jeff Gordon’s 93 Cup victories. Gordon, third on the all-time wins list, has the most wins of any Cup Series driver whose career only spanned the last 30 years.

If Busch puts himself ahead of Gordon on the Cup wins list and ends up with 50 more victories than Petty, the conversation gets really fun. Busch will have positioned himself as the winningest driver in modern NASCAR and will have a cumulative win total far ahead of Petty’s. The case for Busch as one of the greatest NASCAR drivers of all-time will be extremely strong, even if he doesn’t have seven championships.

That case is a long time away, however. And that goal of 250, he said, is just a number. It could change and get even loftier.

“It’s just a number,” Busch said. “It was a goal I set out for myself and I wasn’t sure that it would be achievable and obviously we’re getting close to that and I’ve got a long ways to go and I’m going to have to reassess those goals and put a new number out there eventually and we’ll see what that ends up being.”

But whatever Busch’s total ends up being won’t be directly comparable to Petty’s wins because of the myriad factors listed above. As NASCAR continues to change on a seemingly yearly basis, comparing driver accomplishments so far apart from each other can be a futile exercise. In a society that likes to debate and declare someone or something the best of all time, pitting Busch and Petty against each other may be impossible.

“That’s the point,” Kyle Petty said. “The point is don’t try to compare them. Because I think what Bobby and Cale and Darrell and Earnhardt and Pearson and Jeff Gordon and Richard Petty have done is phenomenal. And I think in a totally different category that runs kind of parallel in a parallel universe, what Kyle Busch has done is just as incredible. Just as spectacular.”

Kyle Busch’s win at Phoenix on Sunday was the 194th of his NASCAR career. (Getty)
Kyle Busch’s win at Phoenix on Sunday was the 194th of his NASCAR career. (Getty)

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

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