This was the Final Season that Fox Sports/FX, TNT, and NBC covered the Busch Series. Starting in 2007, as part of a new TV contract with the television networks of The Walt Disney Company, ESPN2 televised the entire Busch season with select races on ABC.
There has been some controversy of the use of NEXTEL Cup teams with their drivers in Busch Series races, most notably at NEXTEL Cup tracks where there are Busch Series support races. This has been dubbed by Fox Sports announcer Mike Joy as "Busch Whacking", and many underfunded (or one-car) teams have failed to qualify for these races because of this. Out of the 35 races that were run in the 2006 Busch Series season, 33 of those races were won by NEXTEL Cup Series drivers. The only 2 non-NEXTEL Cup Series drivers that won Busch Series races in 2006 were David Gilliland at Kentucky and Paul Menard at Milwaukee. The 2006 season has been notable for those "double duty" drivers even traveling to sites where there are stand-alone races at Nashville Superspeedway, Kentucky Speedway, Autódromo Hermanos Rodriguez and The Milwaukee Mile just to name a few, even on the rare weeks where there are no NEXTEL Cup races. Kentucky was the big upset where one of the underfunded one-car teams took advantage and pulled off the big upset.
In the end, Kevin Harvick, who at the time drove for Richard Childress Racing in the Cup series, won the 2006 championship on October 13, the second of his career having previously won in 2001. After Harvick won the title, talk began about limiting the number of "Busch Whackers" (Cup drivers) in each race or capping the double-dippers appearances for the entire season or even having a "Chase for the NEXTEL Cup" playoff system in place for the 2007 season since Harvick was so dominant during 2006 as NEXTEL Cup drivers won every race but two in the season. Ultimately, no changes were made until 2011, where NASCAR announced that Cup drivers could only run for points in one series. A limit over the number of races Cup drivers could run was not put into effect until over a decade later in 2017. The Busch/Nationwide/Xfinity Series did not have a playoffs ("Chase") until 2016, ten years later.
