Kyle Busch Battles to Win as One of the’ Other Guys’ This Season

Kyle Busch is, with very little argument, one of the premier drivers in America’s top stock car racing series. With 63 wins in the NASCAR Cup Series and two championships over a career that’s spanned two decades, he’s used to the limelight, center stage, basking in all the attention. But this season? This season, things are different.

For the first time in his storied career, the future NASCAR Hall of Famer isn’t in the Playoffs. He’s not a title contender—he’s one of the “other guys,” those drivers with no shot at a championship but still battling for wins. For Busch, that’s a shift unlike any he’s faced before.

"It's definitely different, and I wouldn't say it's any harder," Busch said. "You just don’t have the pressure of everything mounting and being on top of you.”

And without that pressure? Well, it changes his approach.

“I mean, it does change the mindset,” Busch continued. “You can think of your strategy in a few different ways, but you know we all agreed that we kind of missed on it last week. Logano was behind us on that final run in the race, and he just stretched it and was able to make it. He won the race, and we were ahead of him that whole run before we pitted, you know… I feel like that could have been us. That could have been a shot where we just say, ‘Hey, you know what, screw it. What’s the difference between first, if you’re not first or last, you know… we just didn’t do it. And we kind of missed out on one last week.”

For Busch and his team at Richard Childress Racing, this was the 33rd “miss” of 2024. Busch has been winless since Gateway last June—his last victory in a season that saw him win three times. Last season, he made the Playoffs, but he came up short of the title, finishing 14th. Now, with only three races left in the 2024 season, he’s staring down the reality of ending his 20-year streak of winning at least one race every season.

So what changed? How did a three-time winner and championship contender in 2023 become one of the “other guys,” hunting for just a single race win now? Busch says they have some answers—but not all. A big factor, he says, is the game of push-and-pull that teams play with NASCAR’s rulebook.

“We kind of feel like there’s definitely some tricks that happen in the garage area that aren’t necessarily seen by the naked eye,” he said. “We’re behind on those. We had some of our own we were utilizing at the beginning of last year that we got caught on… rules were made after that. And then this year, it’s just, you know, we’re missing something with front grip. We just go to these racetracks… and we just don’t feel the front tires are in the racetrack. And we can run the same exact setup as the Hendrick cars, line on line, and we just do not have the speed they have. So there’s definitely something else within the vehicle that isn’t on paper.”

So, if NASCAR’s keeping the envelope small, should teams be given a bigger one to push?

“It’s either that so you can have teams focusing on different ways of exploiting rules that they can exploit, or it’s just you gotta be a better traffic cop,” Busch said. “I feel like NASCAR does a good job of that, but there’s still a lot, again, that you don’t see with the naked eye that they can’t pick out that is happening.”

There’s no doubt Busch would rather be in the high-stakes, high-pressure bubble of the Playoffs. But, like it or not, he’s on the outside. All he can do now is try to put together a race in the final three that ends in victory and keeps that win streak alive. And maybe—just maybe—find a part of the envelope he can push just a bit more, something NASCAR’s naked eye won’t catch.