Kurt Busch headlines historic 2026 NASCAR Hall of Fame class

Kurt Busch was among those honored with a place in the NASCAR Hall of Fame on Tuesday, enshrining him in history for the rest of time.

Busch was joined in the Class of 2026 by fellow former Cup Series drivers Harry Gant and Ray Hendrick, with Humpy Wheeler the recipient of the Landmark Award.

Gant remains the oldest driver to win a Cup Series race, aged 52 when he took his last trip down victory road – just a year after his astonishing Mr September streak of 1991, when he won all four Cup Series races in the month.

Hendrick, or Mr Modified, had a less storied Cup Series (and more poorly recorded) career due to both the era in which he raced and his enthusiasm for racing in as many series as possible, which saw him ranked fourth on the all-time list of Modified drivers in 2010, two decades after his death.

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Busch: I was in race mode at Hall of Fame announcement

2004 Cup Series champion Busch admitted after his name was called that he'd found himself nervous before the announcement, with his name the last to be revealed after Gant and Hendrick.

The 46-year-old admitted: “I felt like it was race mode. I had to put the emotional blinders on.”

He added: “For me, as just a blue-collar kid out of Vegas, I never would have imagined this. We were a family where it was just a hobby. It’s like a hobby to race, you know. It was just fun to go to the track as father and son.

"My dad had his car, and he helped me build mine, and you meet this guy or you meet this sponsor or you say thank you to this person, and the next thing you know — I mean, I’ll talk about this later on at the speech — but I’m running a Legend Car in 1999 at the (Las Vegas) Bullring in September of 1999.

"September of 2000, I’m in Jack Roush’s Cup car qualifying at Dover. Jeff Gordon’s next to me. Dale (Earnhardt) Senior’s behind me. I mean, that’s how fast things happened for me. I don’t know how. I don’t know why.

“There was no template. There wasn’t the ladder that you see a lot of the kids these days that have a system where it’s ‘we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this'. A lot of mine was being in the right place at the right time, and the universe smiled down on me.”

The newest Hall of Fame group will be inducted Jan. 23, 2026.

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