The late Kyle Busch will inevitably be enshrined into the NASCAR Hall of Fame so one of his future co-inductees and biggest rivals, Brad Keselowski, says why wait.
Earlier in the week, the voting panel elected Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton, Larry Phillips and Lesa France-Kennedy to enshrinement during a ceremony to be held at the Charlotte Convention Center in January.
Typically, NASCAR rules require a driver to be retired for two years to even be nominated, but Keselowski doesn’t believe that is necessary given the inevitable outcome.
“I understand there’s a lot of things to work through on that but it’s very clear that Kyle is a first ballot Hall of Famer and I don’t know why that needs to wait another year,” Keselowski.
So, like immediately?
“Yeah, I think so,” he said.
NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell also addressed the possibility that Busch could be considered as some kind of unique entrant, immediately and posthumously.
“I don’t know,” O’Donnell said. “I know that we put that on the list of ideas that we want to look at. I think — I said earlier there’s things we want to do this weekend, and then we have a little bit more time to think about what we could do as well in the future. Who knows, that could be something we look at.”
What could be done by the end of the year is Busch earning the Most Popular Driver Award for the first time in his career. There is a very direct precedence for an active driving winning the award after the season in which he passed away.
“I would be in extreme favor of Kyle winning the vote,” said Elliott. “I think that, you know, he’s a guy that certainly poured a lot of his life into this sport and although he might have been getting boos a lot of weeks, he also had a lot of fans and a lot of passionate fans.
“I haven’t processed all of that, to get to that point, but I would certainly be in favor of him winning and whatever that took. It would be really deserving for him to have that honor.”
For Keselowski, the advocacy was extra meaningful because there was a well-documented rivalry between the two men.
Even as recently as last month, Busch went on ‘Hang Out with Sean Hannity’ and named Keselowski as one of the three drivers he did not see eye-to-eye with alongside Joey Logano and Carson Hocevar.
Busch was playing it up for the camera a little but there was also a lot of truth to the sentiment. At the same time, their relationship had started to thaw a good bit over the past five years.
Keselowski had been looking forward to fostering a stronger bond with Busch approaching the end of their careers.
“Kind of selfishly I was hopeful for a long time that our racing career would continue on a journey that saw us in the Hall of Fame and doing those type of things together,” Keselowski said. “Who knows? Maybe one day competing in the Truck Series against each other when we were done with Cup.
“Obviously, that’s not going to be the case now, but with respect to our relationship, I would say there was a small thaw over the last year, maybe two, that came from his circumstances being different with respect to race teams and positions on the grid.”
Keselowski said he flew to Dover last weekend for the All-Star Race.
“Those are things I never thought I would have said 3, 5, 10 years ago,” Keselowski said. “So, I think it was on that path. I don’t have any great stories to tell, but it’s sad to not see that through. Whatever loss I have there, honestly, pales in comparison to many others, so I don’t want to overplay that, but it’s the reality.”
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