Kyle Busch is getting even better by the day

This is getting crazy.


Certainly people expected Kyle Busch to have an excellent year. He showed moments of brilliance in his driving over the past two years and was clearly the driver to watch in the future. But who could have predicted this?

Six wins in the opening 18 races. That's winning a third of the season's Sprint Cup competition to date. People go crazy when one team does that, much less one driver.

Watching Busch race, it seems as if there is nothing he cannot do. He won on a Cup road course for the first time this season, won at Daytona for the first time Saturday night. He wove his way through traffic, confident of his car and the willingness of others to draft with him. A night after finishing as a runner-up in the Nationwide Series race, he took lessons learned on the final restart in that race and immediately applied them to his Cup effort.

It's amazing that he can absorb it all that fast. But Busch seems to soak up the lessons, the little things, he picks up every week. He has the uncanny ability to somehow be a spectator to his own driving, to be in the heat of the moment while also tabulating what is going on around him, how he could react better to it next time and what someone else did that put them ahead of him.

Who knows how Busch really does it, but to an observer he appears to be constantly cataloging what is happening around him and figuring out how he can use that particular move, how he can adopt something that works, and then manages to apply it to the coming laps instead of the coming races.

And he's only 23.

It's easy to forget that watching Busch race. Sometimes it's easy to forget that hearing him talk about those races. But Busch is maturing and developing under the melting glare of the national spotlight. He's showing an increasing ability to brush off things that bother him and keep the big picture in mind. Perhaps that's easy to do when you're winning in something virtually every week.

Busch is the hottest thing in the sport right now, no question.

He's holding up to the pressure of being the young star, to the heat of leading both Joe Gibbs Racing and the Toyota contingent, even to the anger of fans who roundly boo him and even to the few who tossed beer cans in his direction on the track Saturday night.

For Busch fans, this is the kind of season they've been hoping for. For his detractors, this is turning into a nightmare to witness.

Both should expect more of the same in the months to come because Busch is only getting better each week.

Can he move into the double-digit Cup win category this season? Don't rule it out.