Make or Break: Kurt Busch Edition

Kurt Busch now has a ride for 2012…well, he has a ride for Daytona. We’ll see how things go from there.

Busch, bus-chucked from the Penske Racing Dodge after an embarrassing tirade at Homestead, wandered in the wilderness for a bit and ended up going with the feisty James Finch and Phoenix Racing for 2012.

While it might be a coup for the 51 team, there are some pretty major “maybes” for the pairing, notably keeping a lid on the elder Busch’s volatile temper. Finch made his money in construction, and he’s not above a work-site solution to the yapping Busch does.

At least that’s the way it sounds.

"He lost a job and he's lost several million dollars, and so I think that's been a wake-up call," Finch said after the hire was done. “I told him, I said, ‘Kurt, it's about winning racing. You need to watch your temper and your mouth.'"

While I respect Finch a ton for what he’s been able to do over the years, I wonder if he knows how hard that’s going to be. Busch is 33 years old, and usually, when you reach that age, you are who you are. And Kurt Busch is a temper tantrum waiting to happen.

Still, Finch is approaching it the right way.

 "I hired him for his foot and not his mouth,” Finch said. “Hopefully we can get him controlled. He's got a long way to come. He's got to show people he's going to be a driver. And show NASCAR that he's a driver, and he's going to do what's expected as a driver."

NASCAR, I suspect, is less of a problem than the “people” Finch is talking about. While it’s never good to see one of your top drivers reduced to profanity and serial smart-aleck behavior, it doesn’t hurt that people are always spelling NASCAR correctly, if you know what I mean.

Attention is attention, be it good or bad, and when Busch is boiling over, it makes for entertaining copy and sound bites. Of course, there’s the need for a good, solid seven-second delay button, but what’s a little swearing among friends?

Here’s how it will play out, in my opinion. Busch will do the utmost to be the “new” Kurt Busch for the first half of the season. He’ll be calmer, more polite and talk the talk. He’ll go out of his way to change the public perception of him as a whiny, needy, pathologically insecure prima donna, and for a while he’ll succeed.

But when it comes down to it, he’ll erupt one day and click the radio button…and that will be that. Finch spends his own money doing this, and he’s not going to take a bunch of stuff from a guy who is getting regular checks with his name on the signature line.

Busch has to understand that he’s down to his last last chance. True, he is a NASCAR Sprint Cup champion, and yes, he’s one of the top drivers in the business. But that only cuts so much, and he’s not driving for a mega-team. He has to impress one guy, and that’s Finch. If he doesn’t, I can see David Reutimann or Brian Vickers in the seat before Richmond.