Kyle Busch would consider Nationwide title his biggest achievement in NASCAR

Kyle Busch admits that winning a NASCAR Nationwide Series title isn’t the same as winning a Sprint Cup Series crown, nor would it entirely atone for him missing this year’s Chase For The Sprint Cup.

But as the Las Vegas native closes in on his first NASCAR championship, he unhesitatingly asserts that a Nationwide title would shoot to the top of his list of motorsports accomplishments, which include 16 Cup wins.

“It would be the biggest one I have right now,” Busch says. “The only other championship that I can say I have is Legends cars back at my home track in Vegas. I missed too many races to win a Late-Model championship that year, and so [a Nationwide title] would be pretty big.”

Busch, who enters Saturday’s Able Body Labor 200 at Phoenix International Raceway 247 points ahead of second-place Carl Edwards and another 20 up on Brad Keselowski, can clinch the championship a week early by leaving Phoenix with a 195-point lead.

If Busch finishes at least seventh with no laps led, ninth with at least one lap led or 10th with the most laps led, he’ll seal the championship no matter how Edwards performs.

To clinch in the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Busch just needs an average finish of 30th over the last two races, a 32nd-place finish and a lap led in each event or a 33rd-place finish and the most laps led in each event.

Busch was docked 25 driver points Wednesday for a rules infraction by his No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing team last weekend at Texas Motor Speedway, leaving him a little smaller cushion heading into the last two races, but it would still take a mini-miracle for him to lose the championship.

“We sat down before [the season opener at] Daytona, and our ultimate goal was to win a championship,” says crew chief Jason Ratcliff, who called the shots for Busch for most of his part-time schedule in 2008. “So you had to approach the whole season differently than what you did last year. Last year didn’t matter. Either we wanted to finish first or … second didn’t matter. This year, it does. I mean, we’ve got enough of ’em. So you approach it differently.

“All of these guys, they’ve just done a tremendous job. There have been some times, even for this race team, that you walk in Monday morning and wonder, ‘Man, who just shot your dog?’”

While Busch has enjoyed the kind of Nationwide campaign that most of his competitors would envy, he hasn’t enjoyed finishing second so often. As far as he’s concerned, his series-high eight victories have been somewhat tainted by the fact that he has finished second a whopping 11 times.

“I’ve wished that we would have been further ahead than where we are right now,” Busch says of the points standings. “I would have liked to have wrapped the championship up a few weeks earlier, but we are where we are. Given the 11 second-place finishes, it’s tough, and it’s frustrating when you get those, but you know it’s a good points day. You know after you recognize it on the plane ride home … it was a good day, but you’re still mad you didn’t get to take the trophy home.”

According to JGR team President J.D. Gibbs, the 24-year-old Busch has done a better job of finding the positives on days when he finishes well but doesn’t go to victory lane.

“I think what you learn by taking those is you learn how to win a championship,” Gibbs said. “On the Cup side, take the fifths, the 10ths, the 12ths and just take them and move on. I think he’s really done a good job of not being happy about seconds [in Nationwide] but being willing to take them for the bigger goal, if that makes sense.”

Busch hasn’t run a full slate in NASCAR’s No. 2 series since finishing second in his rookie season of 2004. He plans to enter a number of Nationwide races next year but probably not the entire schedule.

Busch believes his success has validated his decision to run all 35 races in 2009 after a 30-race campaign in 2008. And he also has no regrets about his partial schedule for Billy Ballew Racing in the Camping World Truck Series.

Busch has seven wins in 13 Truck starts and still has a shot at helping team owner Billy Ballew pick of the 2009 owners championship.

Such magical runs in the Nationwide and Truck series have served as somewhat of a consolation prize for Busch after missing the Chase in a season when he was expected to seriously contend for the Cup title.

“If you can win a Nationwide championship and the owners championship for Ballew and miss out on the Chase, I would feel like that’s a successful year,” he says. “People might question where my focus is – it’s supposed to be on the Cup side – but to be honest with you, we didn’t have the cars capable enough of getting ourselves into the Chase. That’s why we missed the Chase. It’s not due to a lack of focus or lack of effort by the team or me or anybody else involved. It’s just situationally, it didn’t work out.”

Ratcliff says that the up-and-down nature of Busch’s Cup season probably put a little extra pressure on the Nationwide team to help their driver run well.

“We hoped that we would put good enough cars on the race track that he could go out there and not be concerned with what’s happening over there [in Cup], good or bad,” he says. “Just be able to come over here and have a good time, win some races, shoot for this championship, and it would be kind of a different environment for him. And I think we’ve done that.”

Busch takes even more pride in his Nationwide season knowing that his main competition has come from fellow full-time Cup drivers. While Edwards is the only other full-time Cup driver running the whole Nationwide schedule, multiple Cup drivers and teams have entered most of the races.

So you might say that Busch subscribes to the theory that if you can’t beat them on Sundays, you might as well try to on Saturdays. And he has – often.

“It makes it better when you’ve got the Cup guys that come over to race with you on the Nationwide tour,” he says. “If it was just me racing against the rest of the [Nationwide] guys, then it would look kind of silly. … But we still have guys like Jeff Burton, Clint Bowyer - I can’t even name them all - Greg Biffle, Matt Kenseth, you know them.

“Since all those guys come over and race with us. That’s what makes it fun because you go out there and you can beat those guys, and you know they’re at Roush [Fenway Racing], [Richard Childress Racing}, who dominated this thing a few years ago, [and] are in good cars. You know that you’re not an idiot, and you know you can drive. At least it makes it a little easier when you look at things.”