Driving a car at 200mph inches from another car takes a certain amount of cajones. It takes a certain amount of confidence. Remember the beginning of Top Gun? The baddest pilot on the planet got spooked, lost his confidence and couldn’t get it back. And the same thing damn near happened to Maverick as well. I personally contend that this is what happened to Rusty Wallace after Dale Earnhardt died. He got spooked, started driving too safe, and the wins dried up.  So I contend that a certain amount of attitude is necessary to drive a racecar. To quote a movie, you have to be “so tough that they couldn’t castrate you with a chainsaw.”

Enter Kyle Busch. Nascar’s current Darth Vader. Or John McEnroe. Or Terrell Owens. He wins. He talks. He wins some more. He talks some more. He’s got kind of a shit-eating grin. And then goes out and wins. He drives dangerous (I can see Iceman chiding Maverick now) and puts his car in situations no sane person would, and makes it work. But something happened after his Nashville win. I think the constant criticism of his celebratory guitar smash got in his head. I also believe that after that episode he probably had a mandatory meeting with the Joe Gibbs Racing PR department, where he got read the riot act. So recently we’ve been seeing a kinder, gentler Kyle. He even spoke of such matters last week in an interview with Marty Smith. I’d bet money though that it’s all a PR plan that was put in place weeks earlier, say, after Nashville.

However, concurrent with his rise in niceness has been a decline in performance. His last six finishes were 16, 38, 33, 14, 7, 22. That’s not exactly setting the world on fire. Now, there are many possible explanations for this. Some people would say that the 18 had been getting away with something and Nascar caught on. The way the 24 or the 48 push the rules and simply get told, don’t bring that back to the track. Maybe. Maybe the other teams have just caught up. But I think it’s attitude. And the perfect example for Kyle is his own brother, Kurt. When Kurt was winning a lot he was also pissing people off left and right, even enough to lose his job at Roush despite winning a championship there. At Penske he was basically told to cut it out and act like a professional, and to his credit, he has. But I think he lost his killer instinct in the process. And Kyle is in danger of doing the very same thing. So Kyle needs to determine what he wants to do – be hated and win, or be good and keep everyone else happy. At the end of a career, nobody looks at how much of a jerk you were. They look at your stats. In some cases, after you’ve been around the block a few times people can be real forgiving (see Waltrip, Darrell). Up until now Kyle has been ready, willing and able to embrace the bad-boy persona, the question is whether that time has passed.