Kyle Busch can feel it.
The wear and tear of muscling these NASCAR Sprint Cup cars (and, in his particular case, sometimes Xfinity cars and even trucks) around the track week to week is tough on the body. Especially as one gets older, and doesn't slow down.
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It's hard for people who haven't been in a racecar to understand what a driver feels. How could they?
The closest comparison Busch finds from fans? The Richard Petty Driving Experience or something similar.
One of those runs — without elite competitors on the track or tagging your bumper — generally alters a fan's perspective.
"Their quotes to me are, 'Man, we've got a heck of a lot more respect for you. That was a lot more than we anticipated or expected that we'd feel.' So, you always get that and I always encourage people to go get a chance to get in a race car to kind of feel and see what we do," Busch, the 2015 Sprint Cup champion, told media members on Friday.
Now, expand that. Do it four, four-and-a-half hours a weekend. Every weekend. Sometimes with a tire test between races. Often with more than one race on the weekend.
Always with the chance of a crash, the fight for the win. The knowledge of what is to come.
And while aging. Not that Busch is old. But he does sound like the man of 31 that he is when he compared racing now to his past. He talked about the years when the crashes and just the general manhandling one's body undergoes while driving a racecar didn't matter. When his body bounced back quickly.
"I can say that now because when I was 18, 19 or 20 years old or younger I really didn't feel it," he said. "I could go through a whole season and I really didn't feel it a whole lot. Well, now I'm 31 and I feel it a heck of a lot more."
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Ironically, he discovered just how much last year.
Busch missed the 2015 season's first 11 races recovering from a broken leg and broken ankle from a crash in the season-opening Xfinity race at Daytona.
Missing those races, though, allowed him to feel pretty good at season's end. The championship probably helped.
Might not be quite like that this year.
"Certainly, I remember it late last year getting towards the end of the year I actually still felt pretty good — I only ran half of the year," he said. "This year now I've run from the beginning of the year I'm getting to about the halfway point and I'm feeling the same way I did at Homestead and we still have another half of the year to go."
Busch drives this weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, wrapping up with Sunday's New Hampshire 301.