The NASCAR season begins this Saturday with the non-points Budweiser Shootout ahead of next Sunday’s Super bowl of the sport, the season-opening . WagerWeb.com previews the prospects of No. 51 at Daytona.

After a major fall from grace, 2004 points champion Busch is starting over with a small, fledgling Cup team. Perhaps no driver in NASCAR history has fallen as quickly as Busch has.

“What did I learn from it? I was doing a lot of things wrong,” he said.

Doing things wrong like berating his team through R-rated radio transmissions and contentious media sessions; threatening to fight a reporter and ripped a transcript out of the hands of another; then, firing through a verbal tirade of an ESPN personality caught on camera, igniting 700,000 views on YouTube and fan-triggered bans of former sponsor Shell Pennzoil. lIt was that behavior that served as the catalyst for Busch and Penske Racing to part ways at the end of 2011.

“At the end of the day, is it the money you’re putting in your pocket, or the fun you’re having while doing it?” Busch said. “There’s been a lot of advice I’ve been given this offseason and it’s been a great way to digest and now I’m excited to get to the track and put it into place.”

The place is now the small-funded, one-car team of Phoenix Racing. Driving the No. 51 car a full season has given life to the ashes of the 2004 champ. Busch knows life will be much different at Phoenix Racing, where there are 18 employees to support a single-car operation, than it was during the six years he was top dog at Penske Racing, which employs closer to 300 and ran multiple cars. While most NASCAR teams are based within 10 or 20 miles of the NASCAR R&D Center in Concord, N.C., Phoenix Racing is located in Spartanburg, S.C., about 80 miles to the southwest.

“There are going to be little victories that we claim, even if it’s finishing 15th and putting the car back in hauler without a scratch on it,” Busch said. “Those are going to be big days because we have two really good bullets right now — our superspeedway car for Daytona and we have a car that came from Hendrick that’s got a ton of R&D stuff on it. So I need to protect that car when we go to Vegas [in the third week of the season] because you want that car again in a couple of weeks at California. So we need to take care of that baby right now, and then hopefully we’ll get a few more built like that.”

While Busch is having fun with his new team, he knows that racing can be a lot of fun when winning is involved. And he and Phoenix Racing should be contenders at Daytona. Phoenix Racing’s lone Sprint Cup victory came at Daytona’s sister track, Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway, in April 2009 with Brad Keselowski driving, while Busch has 12 top-10 finishes in 22 point-paying starts at Daytona, including runner-up finishes in the Daytona 500 in 2003, 2005 and 2008. Last year, he won the Budweiser Shootout and the first of the two 150-mile Gatorade Duel qualifying races.

Place your NASCAR bets at our online sportsbook!