Getty Chris Buescher walks grid at Texas.
By the numbers, Chris Buescher is one of the best drivers in NASCAR Cup Series history. He’s at the top of the sport. But make no mistake, it took a lot of hard work and sacrifice to get here. How much sacrifice?
The RFK Racing driver detailed his journey and revealed how it started at the ripe young age of 15 when he left his family and home in Texas for North Carolina.
“Not the most fun way to go about it for sure,” Buescher told “Beating & Banging” of leaving home. “But I think I was 13 and we were sitting in the living room in Prosper and kind of talking about this hobby that we were doing, going to the racetrack, and said, ‘Alright, if we want this to be serious, we’re gonna have to put in a little bit more work and more effort, going to have to make some decisions.’
“And so that time it was, ‘Alright, when summer break gets here, we’re gonna take off to Charlotte and we’re gonna go race for three months. And, it’s not gonna be your summer vacation that all the kids have where you get in trouble and just run around and goof off.’ We took off to Charlotte and worked on race cars. Raced I think 60-something races. On track 60 times over the course of three months.
“We stayed busy and got to know a lot of people and met some good friends. The Ragan family being a couple of those friends. Through that I had a lot of good advice from him. And Ken Ragan, who was running the Legends car program out of Harrisburg, North Carolina at the time, basically got to the end of our third year out there and said, ‘Look, if you really want to chase this, you need to be out here.’
“He told my dad that and the family wasn’t in a position to move. So Ken Ragan goes, ‘David’s moved out. I got a spare bedroom here at the house, so let’s talk about it. Maybe you come out here and you go work in David’s shop.’ I had started homeschooling through high school just because of travel commitments. To continue that on, moved out there. That took some convincing with Mom, for sure, but moved out there right before I turned 16.”
Chris Buescher Attends Dale Carnegie Classes
Buescher was clearly taken out of his comfort zone with the move. However, he had no idea it was about to get even more uncomfortable.
“I had to attend or was enrolled into Dale Carnegie’s speaking courses down in Charlotte at 15. That was nerve-wracking,” he remembered. “One, I had to get a ride down there every time. And, two, it’s like all around 30 to 40-year-old marketing executives, CEOs. And man, I am out of place. I’m just a kid trying to figure out how to do a little public speaking. It was a lot. Hit you all at once.”
@Chris_Buescher is a Texan. I’m a Texan. This past weekend at Texas we talked about his Lone Star roots, including the tough decision to leave behind his home and family at age 15 and how he benefitted from enrolling in Dale Carnegie classes as a teen.
Did the classes help?
“Oh absolutely. 100%,” he admitted. “Probably should have taken another one somewhere as a refresher. That was probably one of the biggest things I did in my racing career that was not from behind the wheel.”
Chris Buescher in Elite Company
Unsurprisingly, his public speaking skills improved. So did his racing skills. Buescher made his way up through the ranks, dominating ARCA in his only two full-time seasons in 2011-12, winning seven times, including the 2012 championship.
He moved up and ran full-time in the Xfinity Series in 2014 and 2015, achieving similar results, including the 2015 title. He also made his Cup Series debut that year.
In 2016, Buescher’s first full-time in the Cup Series, he won at Pocono. Then he experienced a drought. He didn’t win again until 2022 but since that victory in the Bristol night race, the No. 17 car has consistently been one of the best in the field.
Last year, he won three times at Richmond, Michigan, and the second race of the year at Daytona. With five career wins, the driver moves into elite company and has achieved something only 2.8 percent of all drivers have ever done in the sport.
“It’s certainly in a nice spot, and it’s pretty cool to look at those numbers and realize how small of a company that we are in,” he said. “We’re ready to make those numbers smaller yet. Gotta figure out how to keep going, how to take us up into that next group that’s 10 wins and then beyond that. We’re on our way. We got some work to do yet.”
Will he achieve those lofty goals?
It’s hard to doubt someone who has shown so much commitment to his craft since he was a teen and, more importantly, has been able to convert that hard work and sacrifice into success all the way up through the ranks to the sport’s highest level.