Kurt Busch, who has become one of NASCAR’s Nicest Guys, threw his Sprint Cup muscle into a Raybestos-hosted remote-control race on Friday morning. (Photo: John Clark/NASCAR This Week)

On Friday morning at Daytona International Speedway, Raybestos hosted an RC (that’s remote-control) race near the infield media center and garage.

It wasn’t a high-tech affair. The course was marked off with long white strips and Raybestos boxes.

Raybestos sponsors the Rookie of the Year programs in NASCAR. Two rookies, Terry Cook (a Truck Series vet now competing in Nationwide) and Kevin Conway (believe it or not, Sprint Cup), took part.

So did Kurt Busch, certainly not because he had to. Probably not because he particularly wanted to. Because Busch, maligned for much of his career, has blossomed into the most cooperative, helpful person in NASCAR to the various sponsor reps, track officials and ticket sellers who desperately need the presence of driver/celebrities to help them hype their events.

This doesn’t mean Kurt won’t blow his top tomorrow if things don’t go his way. That’s who he is. The fire burns brightly and in full public view for both Busch brothers.

But Kurt Busch, who once got punched in his race car by Jimmy Spencer and somehow managed to turn Spencer into the good guy by responding to it petulantly and insincerely, tries to do the right things. Sometimes temper gets the best of him - after all, he is a race-car driver, not a guidance counselor or a shoe salesman - but he deserves considerable credit for mending his ways.

Ask the officials of various tracks. Ask the PR reps trying to make modest events into major ones. They all owe Kurt Busch a few favors.

If he can help out, he will. When he climbs into that blue Dodge of his, another switch goes on, and it frequently trips breakers in his psyche. But there’s a time for racing and there’s a time to uphold the responsibility of being a celebrity, and Kurt Busch, using entirely different tacks, has mastered each in his own way.

For what it’s worth, he was also the class of the remote-control racers, which, respectfully, wasn’t exactly an elite class on this cloudy morning at Daytona.

There was no particular reason for Kurt to be there other than the fact that Raybestos needed a "name" to tie its little soiree together.

Kurt came through like a champ, which he is off the track as much as he was on it in 2004.

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