DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Kyle Busch’s feisty spirit surfaced near the completion of what turned out to be another unfulfilling Daytona 500 for a driver with victories in all of NASCAR’s other crown jewel races.
After starting last Sunday’s Cup Series season opener at Daytona International Speedway in pole position, Busch was running outside the top 20 in the final laps when he let off the gas and faded to the back of the pack as wrecks up front started to muddle the running order. Busch’s crew chief radioed to ask if he had slowed down because the Richard Childress Racing No. 8 Chevrolet was out of fuel.
Busch’s retort was blunt.
“What the hell am I going to rush into the wreck for?” Busch said. “We’re running (expletive) 30th.”
Busch finished 15th, another middling result as he fell to 0-for-21 in the Daytona 500 and extended the longest active streak for most starts in “The Great American Race” without a trip to victory lane.
Whatever spark winning the pole may have provided never materialized; Busch led just 19 laps on a day when there were 65 lead changes and a record 26 drivers who ran up front at some point in a race that began with 41 cars. The optimism of competing with his new crew chief in a points race for the first time faded early, and Busch was left to chew on the fact that a Daytona 500 win remains the glaring void in a career that will almost certainly lead to him eventually joining his older brother in the NASCAR Hall of Fame, with Kurt inducted last month at the stock-car racing shrine in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“If I don’t ever win it, I’m going to have to be happy with not ever winning it. I’ve pretty much fulfilled my career,” said Busch, who does have crown jewel victories in the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway (2015, 2016), the Southern 500 at South Carolina’s Darlington Raceway (2008) and the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway (2018).
“I’ve pretty much fulfilled my career,” the Las Vegas native added. “If it were to end yesterday, I would be happy with everything.”
Just not much of late.
At age 40, Busch is reeling on a 94-race losing streak in Cup Series competition that would have once seemed inconceivable. And this season, a contract year for Busch with Richard Childress Racing, he has turned to a new crew chief to resuscitate his career — all while embroiled in an $8.5 million lawsuit against an insurance company — to remind everyone he can still hang on as a contender for the season championship.
“It’s something I never would have thought would happen,” Busch said.
Through his first two decades in NASCAR, one thing showed no signs of changing: Busch was a winner. Take 2008, his first season with Joe Gibbs Racing. He won eight races in the Cup Series, 10 more in NASCAR’s second-tier series for cars and three in the third-tier Truck Series.
“Literally, these words came out of my mouth: ‘See, it can be easy,'” Busch said with a laugh.
He made it look easy. Busch won Cup Series titles with JGR in 2015 and 2019 and romped through NASCAR’s lower two series with so much ease that rules were put in place to limit the number of races that drivers from the top circuit could enter each season.
“We were just laughing,” Busch said. “It can be easy. It’s just a matter of how well prepared you are and how good your stuff is.”
Busch’s stuff was good enough to win 232 times across the three national series (102 in the second-tier series currently sponsored by O’Reilly Auto Parts, 67 in Truck races, 63 in Cup races), breaking the record set by NASCAR legend Richard Petty. Busch moved to RCR in 2023, and he showed flashes of being the same elite racer as he was at JGR with three wins in the first 15 regular-season races on the Cup Series schedule.
Then the checkered flags dried up. Busch’s career tapered off, which was inexplicable because of his talent yet understandable because RCR — the team with which Dale Earnhardt won six of his seven Cup Series titles — had long receded from its spot as a championship contender.
AP photo by Jeff Roberson / Kyle Busch bows to fans while holding the checkered flag as he celebrates after winning a NASCAR Cup Series race at World Wide Technology Raceway on June 4, 2023, in Madison, Ill. It was the 63rd win of his Cup Series career, but Busch has not been back to victory lane on NASCAR’s highest level since then.
Busch admits there are days he still finds it unfathomable he won’t finish his career at JGR. After he flamed out early in his career at Hendrick Motorsports, Busch found a fit driving for Gibbs, the former NFL coach who is a member of both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
He had the best of everything in the JGR No. 18 Toyota, fueled in large part by the financial support of longtime sponsor Mars. Even as recently as 2020, Busch believed there was a shot he could finish his career with seven Cup Series titles, which would tie the record shared by the retired Petty, the late Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson, who runs only a limited schedule these days.
Once Mars pulled out of the sport after 2022, Busch and JGR failed to land the timely sponsorship deal that infuses teams with the big payday largely needed to operate. Busch was unceremoniously out as JGR made room for Ty Gibbs, the team owner’s grandson who was a 20-year-old rookie.
“When I don’t have a sponsor, and they have a grandkid waiting in the wings, I’m the odd man out,” Busch said. “I wanted to stay there, finish my career there and never leave. It was the same thing at Hendrick. I got forced out there. I got forced out at Gibbs.”
Childress, who tussled with Busch in 2011 after a Truck Series race at Kansas Speedway, offered the professional lifeline needed in the No. 8 Chevrolet.
The pairing initially seemed perfect — Busch won the second race of the 2023 Cup Series season at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, won again eight races later at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway, then found his way to victory lane five races after that at World Wide Technology Raceway in Madison, Illinois. He followed that with four straight top-10 finishes and seemingly had brought that taste of the good life with him from JGR to RCR.
Busch said in retrospect he realized those wins came in large part because RCR had been ahead of the curve when NASCAR launched its Next Gen car in 2022.
“RCR was actually involved in a lot of the car’s development in the early stages with NASCAR,” Busch said. “They were one of the first teams to work on things and get ahead of it. (At JGR), we didn’t do anything. We were like, ‘Nah, we’re not going to do anything. We’ll deal with it when we get there.'”
JGR, Hendrick and Team Penske soon caught up — and surpassed — RCR and Busch. Even 23XI Racing seems to have sped past, with Tyler Reddick winning the Daytona 500 last weekend for the team with ownership that includes JGR driver Denny Hamlin and basketball great Michael Jordan.
“The RCR gang, for whatever they were ahead, just seemed to plateau,” Busch said. “The competition crossed us over, and they’re much better. We’re trying to play catch-up.”
Busch posted just 10 top-10 Cup Series results each of the past two seasons, when he failed to even make the 16-car field for the playoffs.
“Honestly, if you’re not with a Gibbs team or a Hendrick team or a Penske team, it doesn’t seem like many other teams win races,” Busch said.
AP photo by Matt Kelley / NASCAR driver Kyle Busch, left, and team owner Richard Childress talk before a Cup Series race at South Carolina’s Darlington Raceway on May 14, 2023. Busch won three times in the first 15 regular-season races that year, his first driving for Childress, but is currently mired in a 94-race losing streak in Cup Series competition.
RCR shook up Busch’s crew ahead of this season and plucked chief Jim Pohlman away from Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s team that competes on the second-tier circuit. Pohlman won a season championship on that level in 2024 with Justin Allgaier, and his addition as chief raised the standard within the RCR No. 8 team.
“We need to win. We’ve got to win,” said Busch, whose most recent NASCAR victory came in a Truck Series race last February at Echopark Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway), where he qualified third Friday for Saturday’s race in the third-tier series.
Busch, who hasn’t run on the second-tier circuit since 2024, hasn’t set a timetable on his career and said he won’t continue to race for purely financial reasons, even as he claimed he is out $10.4 million and filed suit last October, alleging Pacific Life Insurance Company failed to reveal the true risks of the policies, along with providing false and negligent representations of what was supposed to be tax-free income for retirement.
“It’s only driven by my passion for it,” Busch said. “The monetary value of my career is irrelevant right now.”
Busch’s son, Brexton, turns 11 this year and has followed his father’s path into racing. He’ll race Legends cars and in junior late model competition this year, and dad still has hopes they can race against each other in the Truck Series once Brexton turns 17.
Busch can’t stomach limping to the finish line of his NASCAR days without celebrating more wins, maybe even more championships. Careers rarely end on high notes for the greats, though: Petty reached 200 Cup Series victories in 1984 but never won again before retiring after the 1992 season. Johnson was still in championship form when he won his third race of the season in June 2017 — but never took another checkered flag the final 3 1/2 years of his full-time career.
“At some point, it starts drying up. It did for me, and it will for others,” said the 50-year-old Johnson, who is devoting much more of his NASCAR attention now to ownership of Legacy Motor Club’s three-car team. “None of us know where that is for Kyle right now until he decides to step away.
“But there is a moment out there for everyone where production just goes down. Whatever it is, it dries up. I hope that isn’t the case for him. He’s such a talent.”