Kurt Busch pays Roush $110,000 for the Ford F-150 that launched him
Twenty-one years after a bitter exit, Kurt Busch pays Jack Roush a six-figure sum
Kurt Busch now owns the truck that started his career. The 2004 NASCAR Cup champion bought his No. 99 Exide Ford F-150 from the Roush Automotive Collection at Mecum's first Nashville sale, following the bidding from a plane. The final price was $110,000. "It was a little more than I wanted to spend," he said, "but it goes to Jack's pocket and Jack helped me a lot."
Busch's No. 99 Ford F-150 won at Dover in September 2000
The truck is chassis B061/CT12, the one Busch drove to victory at Dover in September 2000, and it still wears its original paint and airbrushed livery. The price breaks down as a $100,000 hammer plus Mecum's 10 percent buyer's premium, about 2.7 times the sale's median result of $40,700. On X, Busch said the truck goes to Roush Yates next to have its engine freshened, which reads like a plan to run it rather than park it.
Roush's 1999 "Gong Show" tryout put Kurt Busch in the truck
Busch earned the seat through Roush Racing's 1999 driver audition, known in the paddock as the Gong Show. As a 21-year-old rookie in the 2000 Craftsman Truck Series he won four races, took Rookie of the Year and finished second in the championship, 230 points behind teammate Greg Biffle, who gave Roush its first Truck title. Roush then moved Busch straight into its No. 97 Cup Ford for 2001, skipping the second tier entirely.
The 2004 Cup title and Roush's 2005 suspension of Kurt Busch
The partnership peaked with the first Chase-format Cup title in 2004 and ended badly a year later. After a traffic stop near Phoenix in November 2005, Roush Racing suspended Busch for the last two races of the season, with team president Geoff Smith saying the team was "officially retiring as Kurt Busch's apologists". Busch, already signed to Penske for 2006, went on to 34 Cup wins with five teams and four manufacturers before a 2022 concussion at Pocono ended his full-time career.
Greg Biffle's 2004 Ford Taurus sold in the same Roush offering
Busch's truck made more than any other Roush NASCAR car among the 38 lots from the collection. Carl Edwards' 2011 Mustang fetched $73,700, and Biffle's 2004 Ford Taurus sold for $51,700 to YouTuber Cleetus McFarland, with the proceeds going to the Biffle Family Fund. Biffle died with his wife, his two children and three others when his plane crashed at Statesville, North Carolina, on 18 December 2025. At his Hall of Fame induction in January, Busch said the two had been "like peanut butter and jelly" as Cup teammates.
Paul Newman's 1995 Mustang topped the $66.2 million Mecum Nashville sale
The top lot of the whole five-day sale also came from Roush: the 1995 Mustang Cobra "Nobody's Fool", which Paul Newman, then 70, shared to a GTS-1 class win and third overall at the Rolex 24 at Daytona. It brought $935,000. Roush had refitted the car's original race-worn bodywork for the auction. The company is selling part of a collection of more than 150 vehicles to mark its 50th anniversary, on the argument that cars are meant to be driven.
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Buying back your own race car is usually a vanity purchase, and this one is closer to a settlement. Busch paid well above the sale's median to the owner whose team publicly gave up on him in 2005, and he said why in plain words while the bidding was still running. That is a better ending to the Roush years than either side managed at the time, and it came from the man who had more reason to hold a grudge.
The weekend also put a price on originality. Newman's Mustang sold with its race-worn body back on, and Busch's truck carries its first paint and airbrush work, so the right move is to freshen the engine and leave the body exactly as it won at Dover. If the truck turns a lap in public before the end of the 2027 season, Roush's line about cars being meant to be driven will have found its best-placed buyer.
