Kyle Busch critical of NASCAR for providing driving data to all teams

In an attempt to help lower costs and help smaller teams remain competitive with the top teams, NASCAR is sharing team data such as racing lines and other details to all teams in the series. That is something 2015 NASCAR Cup champion Kyle Busch strongly disagrees with.

“It’s sharing all the driver traces through SMT that all the manufacturers are buying into now,” Busch said. “Anybody can see my driver track wherever they are now and that’s a big issue to me. It’s a big thing to other some of the drivers as well. We’re still trying to work on that.”

And why is Busch against the data sharing? He gave a passionate reply.

“Because I’ve spent 13 years in this sport to figure out how to drive a race car to make it go fast and the do the things that I do to make it go fast and win championships and now you are going to hand all of that to a young driver on a piece of paper and they are going to figure it out as long as they know how to read it,” Busch said. “Sure, they still have to do it but at least they know what I’m doing so if they study that enough they will know how to beat me, or I will know how to beat you.

“That’s our signature. Us driving a race car is our way of figuring out how to make a race car go around the track fast. It’s not how we are driving our car at particular moments, it’s how we set up our cars.”

Busch believes his data and driving traces are proprietary information.

“How I became good at Martinsville didn’t come by myself but talking and learning from Denny Hamlin,” Busch said. “It was looking and studying and talking to him. That’s how I became good at Martinsville.

“If everybody else does these things and drives Martinsville a particular way you will have a boring ass race because everybody will drive the same speed and do the same thing because it’s the fastest way to get around there.

“I don’t see it as being positive to this sport. When we are all driving the same that is not a positive thing.”

Busch has expressed his concerns to NASCAR.

“They say they are saving the manufacturers money because other manufacturers were scraping the screen through Race-View,” Busch said. “So, NASCAR decided to hand it out to everybody and give it away for free.”

Busch said if a driver isn’t studying film in this day and age, “they are an idiot.

“Everything is on YouTube but I can’t give away everything. We look at it as proprietary, but NASCAR doesn’t. It’s like an NFL team giving the opponent their Playbook.”