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Kyle Busch Has 100 NASCAR Xfinity Series Wins

Photo credit: Sarah Stier - Getty Images
Photo credit: Sarah Stier - Getty Images

Kyle Busch won today's NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Nashville Superspeedway, leading 122 of 189 laps to become the first winner in the series at this track since it was briefly closed from 2011 to this season. None of this is notable, as Busch has been a dominant force in the NASCAR Xfinity Series since 2004 and is the heavy favorite in every race he enters in the second-tier category.

What is notable is that the win marks Busch's 100th, a mark so exceptional that it is more than twice what second-placed Mark Martin, a 49-time winner, boasts. It makes him the third-ever driver to win 100 or more races in a national-level NASCAR series, joining the two three-digit Cup Series drivers Richard Petty and David Pearson. It extends his all-time record for most NASCAR National Series wins to a comical 219, comfortably besting Petty's famous mark of 200.

All of those numbers look may look absurd, but that is because they are.

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The Xfinity Series, a second-tier category formerly known as both the Busch Series and the Nationwide Series, was never designed for elite talent to stick around. The category is supposed to be mutually beneficial, a place for NASCAR's top prospects to prove their talents on a national stage while stock car racing's top teams are already at the track to watch. For the past 30 years, it has been plagued by drivers who already graduated from the series racing in it simply because they could. The vast majority of Busch's wins have come in these races, events he has entered since becoming one of the elite talents in the top-level Cup Series. His record-setting 61 wins in the Truck Series, the third-tier category, effectively tell the same story.

Busch said today that he might be done with the Xfinity Series after his final two scheduled starts later this year. When he does so, he will be one of the last to step away from the practice of going down to race regularly in a lower division. The practice slowed when drivers participating in the Cup Series stopped being eligible for championships in 2011, ending what was at that point a five-year streak of full-time Cup Series drivers winning the Xfinity Series title. Official rules limiting total possible entries eventually followed in 2017, further limiting opportunities for Cup drivers to win Xfinity Series races. With Busch potentially done running in those limited races, the era may be over entirely for all but rare one-off drives in interesting races.

That means Busch's 100-win record is almost certainly going to be unattainable for future drivers. It is a startling mark for the unquestioned best driver in the history of the Xfinity Series, but that title is practically meaningless for a driver whose headline is always going to be his top level success: two championships and 58 wins, with a long career left to go. He will probably win at least one of his final two starts, but Busch's hundredth win is a fitting exclamation point on which to end an unremarkable era that made the lower levels of NASCAR racing less meaningful and significantly less competitive

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