'My phone number is wide-open': Could Kyle Busch make his Indy 500 debut?

Indianapolis Star

16 hours ago

NASCAR veteran Kyle Busch has twice come close to an Indy 500 debut opportunity, and he says he'd still be interested.
Busch was close to finalizing a deal with Arrow McLaren in the fall of 2022 for a ride that ultimately went to Kyle Larson.
Busch: 'I'm not going to be making calls and pushing for it. If somebody calls me and says that they're ready to go ... we'll go do it.'
Twice, Kyle Busch has had a major consumer-facing sponsor lined up to foot the bill for an Indianapolis 500 debut, and twice last-minute semantics have derailed his plans yards from the figurative finish line.
Is he willing to pursue what remains his last remaining bucket list-type race before he hands up his helmet for the final time?
'Sure, I would do it. I would give it a go, give it whirl,' the 21-year NASCAR Cup series veteran told IndyStar last month. 'I know Kyle (Larson) ran into some terrible luck with some weather, so Mother Nature wasn't on his side, but maybe they'll be on my side.
'But my phone number is wide-open, so (teams): Call me.'
Busch is among the favorites, of fans on social media since IndyStar reported that McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown is targeting a 'mega,' 'unreal' candidate to pilot Arrow McLaren's fourth one-off 500 entry next year – a driver Brown and team principal Tony Kanaan hope to get in a car for a rookie oval test in the coming weeks or months before deciding whether there's a fit for both sides.
'Conversations with that are ongoing, and it would be mega,' Brown told IndyStar in Toronto. 'I think we're going to do a test first, and when we do that test, it's going to be a bit of a giveaway on who it is, because I don't think we'll be able to do a top-secret test.'
In order to check the 'mega' and 'unreal' boxes, many minds have immediately gone to ex-Formula 1 aces, though several – Daniel Ricciardo and Jenson Button, both major names of the sport's last couple decades who have McLaren ties – have said publicly they have no desire to make a run at the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. Notably, four-time F1 champ Sebastian Vettel said previously he would entertain the idea of running the 500, and he's just 38 and has said he still would like to race after stepping away from F1 after the 2022 campaign. But beyond trying to get into Brown's head and discern just how 'mega' and 'unreal' he means, there's otherwise no indication the retired German F1 driver would be the selection.
Others have called for Xfinity breakout star Connor Zilisch, who seems primed to make a leap to full-season NASCAR Cup series action in 2026, and Zilisch has said the 500 is most certainly on his to-do list, but doing so as a Cup series rookie at 19 years old would seem unwise. And for what it's worth, Brown denied to IndyStar Sunday morning that the six-time Xfinity series race-winner was his target.
But Busch? He held talks with the team three years ago, not long after announcing his switch to the Chevrolet-powered Richard Childress Racing Cup team that would clear the pivotal manufacturer and team owner hurdles he'd struggled with in the past.
According to Busch, in 2017, he had a deal 'signed, sealed and delivered' funded by his Cup sponsor M&Ms, and his Cup OEM Toyota had okay'd the plan to run for a Chevy-powered IndyCar team during the Month of May. 'But guess who said 'No'?' Busch asked fellow Cup veteran Denny Hamlin on an episode of the latter's 'Actions Detrimental' podcast back in May of this year, to which Hamlin answered the team owner they'd shared for the bulk of their careers: 'Joe Gibbs.'
Busch nodded.
'And then I had it signed, sealed and delivered again, and then (Kyle) Larson took it,' Busch replied. As the two-time Brickyard 400 winner tells the story, he had a sponsor – believed to be Menards – that was in talks with Brown in the fall of '22, and most of the details had been settled, until the sides got to who would cover the cost of buying the brand-new car for the effort.
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'The deal was done, and we were about ready to go to contract, and Zak Brown told the sponsor, 'Hey, I need you to buy the car.' And the sponsor was like, 'Why do I want to buy the car? I don't want to buy the car. I don't need the car. I want to sponsor the car. I'm sponsoring Kyle, and he's going to drive the car, but I don't want to buy the car,'' Busch said of the conversation. 'It wasn't two weeks later that I'm talking to this sponsor guy, and he says, 'Yeah, I guess we're too late anyways, now that the opportunity is closed because Larson got it.'
'And it was then I found out Larson signed a two-year deal, and we were only going to do a one-year deal.'
It had been mid-September of that year when Busch announced his shift from JGR to RCR, and by the first week of October, Brown told reporters that someone within Arrow McLaren had been in touch with Busch about the opportunity. Three months later, Arrow McLaren announced that Larson, Hendrick Motorsports and Arrow McLaren had put together an elongated program that would see the 2021 Cup series champ slowly get up to speed over the ensuing 17 months ahead of a May 2024 Indy 500 debut.
That extra 2023 Indy 500 seat at Arrow McLaren would ultimately go to Kanaan, who here made his final 500 and IndyCar start before assuming an advisory role that within 18 months would evolve into his present team principal position.
In May of 2023, Busch told Fox Sports in the wake of his second Indy 500 opportunity that fell through that he was done proactively trying to make the dream happen – seemingly the same attitude the 40-year-old still holds.
'I'm not going to be making calls and pushing for it,' Busch said just over two years ago. 'If somebody calls me and says that they're ready to go, and it all lines up right, so be it. We'll go do it.'