Kyle Busch stopped looking at the NASCAR Cup Series point standings when things started to go downhill for his Richard Childress Racing team this summer, and he doesn’t want to be told where he sits with two races left in the regular season.
For those who do want to know, Busch is 11th in the standings. Not only is Busch no longer in the hunt for the regular-season championship and the 15 playoff points it awards, but he won’t earn any additional bonus points if he’s not among the top 10 drivers in points after Daytona (Aug. 26).
“The mindset is to stop the bleeding,” Busch said Saturday morning. “We’ve got to figure out a way of being able to bounce back in races, which we were. We had some good luck on our side, some good fortune. Maybe we used it all up. But the fact of the matter is when things kind of go awry, it just seems to snowball from there, and we’re not able to stop the bleeding.
“That’s kind of been our way. We were third in points, 30 from the lead, looking for a regular season championship seven weeks ago, and now I don’t even know where we are. I stopped paying attention because I know it’s not good.”
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In the last five weeks, Busch has finished 21st or worse in four races with a third-place result at Richmond Raceway sprinkled in between. He failed to finish two of those races (Loudon and Michigan) and limped to the finish last weekend in Indianapolis with a broken valve spring after running inside the top 10.
“We need to have a good race; a good solid race, and we were looking for that last week and I thought we had that,” Busch said. “We got fifth or six in each stage, and we were running fourth in the running order, and I felt like we were running lap times comparable to the leaders. Probably better than third place. I’m not sure about being able to catch (Michael McDowell and Chase Elliott in first and second), but that would have been a solid day. One that we needed and just didn’t get.”
A lot of what Busch feels his No. 8 team has battled has been circumstantial, a mix between self-inflicted wounds and things out of their control. New Hampshire was a miss. There were bad pit stops at Pocono that kept Busch from having an opportunity to jump the competition.
Busch admitted the team just needs to stop beating themselves. But the two-time series champion is still positive about his chances to compete against the dominant teams going forward.
“My confidence is high,” Busch said. “I like the group and the stuff that we do and the philosophies and ideas and what we learn and all that stuff. It’s all really good.”
But if the on-track performance could match his confidence, Busch would be even happier. And there would be no need for posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) like last week when Busch declared, “I just don’t know anymore.”
“That came from the frustration of just life in general and luck and karma and whatever all the rest of that stuff is,” Busch said. “I just don’t know anymore. I don’t know what to do to change it. I have no idea. There are all the rabbit’s feet in the world and all the four-leaf clovers and everything else. A lot of people say you don’t believe in luck — there is luck. Trust me, I know. I’ve been in this for a long time.
“We had four or five weeks where we had really good luck. We stuffed it in the tire barriers, we didn’t break a radiator or anything like that at the Chicago street race and we came back and finished fifth. That was a lucky day. We stole one on that one. So, we kind of burned all that up there and now we’re paying the price for it over here. So, it’s like, how do you turn it around and get it back headed in the right direction?
“I’ve had talks like this with (Matt) Kenseth before and Carl (Edwards) before, where you go winless seasons and you just wonder what’s not working and there’s nothing you can pinpoint yourself to. (Martin) Truex, he and I have talked about it before. Like, man, you just got to wait until it turns around and eventually it’ll be fine. I guess you look at Truex and the struggles of last year and then his turnaround for this season. So, they’re not wrong, but I’m a very impatient person, and I’m ready for the results to be indicative of how I know they should be.”