DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Kyle Busch’s feisty spirit surfaced late at the end of another empty Daytona 500 for the perennial race loser. The Daytona pole sitter, 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. His crew chief radioed Busch and asked if he slowed because the Toyota was out of fuel.
Busch’s retort was blunter.
“What the (heck) am I going to rush into the wreck for,” Busch said. “We’re running (expletive) 30th.”
Busch finished 15th, another middling result as he ran the longest active Daytona 500 losing streak to 21 straight races. Whatever spark winning the pole may have provided never materialized with only 19 laps led. The optimism of racing for the first time in a points race with a new crew chief faded early, and Busch was left to chew on the fact that a Daytona 500 win remained the lone void in a career that will eventually see him join big brother Kurt in the Hall of Fame.
“If I don’t ever win it, I’m going to have to be happy with not ever winning it,” Busch said. “I’ve pretty much fulfilled my career. If it were to end yesterday, I would be happy with everything.”
Just not much of late.
At 40, Busch is reeling on a once-inconceivable, 94-race Cup Series losing streak, and he has turned in a contract year to a new crew chief at Richard Childress Racing to resuscitate his career — all while embroiled in an $8.5 million lawsuit against an insurance company — to remind everyone that he can still hang on as a championship contender.
“It’s something I never would have thought would happen," Busch said.
How did Kyle Busch fall off?
Through the first two decades of his career, one detail showed no signs of changing: Busch was a winner.
Take 2008, Busch’s first season with Joe Gibbs Racing. He won eight races in the Cup Series, 10 more in NASCAR’s second-tier series and, for good measure, three in the Truck Series.
“Literally, these words came out of my mouth: ‘See, it can be easy,’” Busch said with a laugh.
Busch made it look easy. He won Cup titles with Gibbs in 2015 and 2019 and romped through NASCAR’s lower two series with so much ease that rules were put in place to choke off his number of races 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 — a NASCAR record — across the three national series. Busch moved to Richard Childress Racing in 2023, and he showed flashes he was the same elite racer as he was at JGR with three wins in the first 15 races of the season.
Then, the checkered flags dried up.
Busch’s career tapered off, both inexplicably because of his Hall of Fame talent, yet understandably because RCR had long receded from its spot as a championship contender in the Cup Series.
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 the former NFL coach.
He had the best of everything in the 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 the same seven career titles as record-holders Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty.
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 Joe Gibbs’ grandson, Ty.
“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 season at Fontana, eight races later at Talladega and five races after that at Gateway. 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 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.’”
Gibbs and Hendrick and Team Penske soon caught up — and surpassed — Busch and RCR. Even 23XI Racing sped ahead after winning the Daytona 500 with Tyler Reddick.
“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 10s each of the last two seasons. He is not even a playoff driver, much less racing for a third championship.
“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.
RCR shook up Busch’s race team this season and plucked crew chief Jim Pohlman away from Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s developmental series race team. Pohlman won the former Xfinity Series championship in 2024 with Justin Allgaier — and raised the standard within the RCR team.
“We need to win,” Busch said. “We’ve got to win.”
Can Bush recover in 2026?
Busch 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 in 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 the junior late model series this year, and dad still has hopes father and son can race against each other in Trucks once Brexton turns 17.
Busch can’t stomach limping to the NASCAR career finish line without celebrating more wins, more championships. Careers rarely end on high notes for NASCAR’s greats: Petty won his 200th career race in 1984 and never again when he retired in 1992. Johnson was still in championship form when he won his third race of 2017 in June — and never again over the final 3 1/2 years of his full-time career.
“At some point, it starts drying up,” Johnson said. “It did for me and it will for others. 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.”
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AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
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