1,000 Greatest Drivers: Kasey Kahne

What were his parents thinking?

Kahne kind of blindsided me because he emerged at the time I had stopped watching NASCAR in late high school/early college. I almost entirely skipped the entire 2003 NASCAR season and the first half of in 2004 (in part due to tiring of the post-9/11 pre-race jingoism, in part due to fans frequently throwing stuff on the track to try and induce green flag finishes under fake red flags, and in part because my dad just abruptly decided to cut the cord at the start of 2003; he didn’t even keep the local channels). I also knew that being a NASCAR fan at Cornell would reflect poorly on me or something by that point, but I embraced it again after being utterly rejected in my first year of college. So I had never even heard of Kahne, and this also caused me to underrate Dale Earnhardt, Jr. for a long time ‘cause I just missed his best year and a half. I think the first race I seriously followed again was the Chicagoland race where Tony Stewart intentionally wrecked him out of the lead. And then Dale, Jr. wrecked him out of the lead at Richmond to knock him out of the inaugural Chase, thereby resulting in Jeremy Mayfield making both the 2004 and 2005 Chases for Evernham even though Kahne had outperformed him both years. It seems like drivers really pushed Kahne around for his entire career (Kyle Busch especially) and it seems like he’d have probably done more if he’d just been a little aggressive. I think that’s why he won so much more often on intermediate tracks where the passes are easier to make if you have a dominant car and roughing someone up is rarely part of the strategy. I liked him, but a lot of times I just kind of forgot about him. I remember back in the late, lamented racing-reference.info comments sections, everybody back when he was ostensibly overachieving for his constantly unstable #9 team after Ray Evernham got pushed out was predicting that he’d inevitably be a perennial championship contender if he ever got a top-tier ride. Well, he did get a top-tier Hendrick ride and that didn’t happen, but I suppose if he hadn’t had the concussion at Loudon, he was really building to something in 2013. Definitely a case of unrealized potential. And in retrospect, I don’t think he was overachieving in those Gillett/Evernham/Petty/Yates/insert 15 other owners here cars as much as people thought he was at the time, although I still picked his best race from that period.

But why, oh why, oh why did his parents name him Kasey Kenneth Kahne? I get they wanted to give him a quirky first name for alliterative potential but uh, those initials also stand for something else, you know? Granted, I also had a collection of 20 or 30 stuffed animals in the mid-‘90s (and I still have them; can’t bear to throw them out even though I haven’t looked at them in years; I’d rather donate them but they’re all well-loved enough that no one would want them) and I named one of my cherished Kitty Kitty Kittens “Kelly Kelly Kelly” because I liked the name of using the same first and last name. But I was a ten-year-old who at that point had not heard of the Klan. One would think Kahne’s parents were old enough to not make that mistake. Admittedly, Kasey’s cousin is named Kole and that’s almost as bad…