Mired in the longest winless streak of his Cup career, Kyle Busch says that recovering from his injuries in a 2015 crash at Daytona “was easy compared to this.”
Busch goes into the final two races of the regular season — Saturday at Daytona (7:30 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock) and Sept. 1 at Darlington — needing a win to make the playoffs. The two-time Cup champion has not missed the playoffs since 2012.
Also at stake is his NASCAR-record streak of 19 consecutive seasons with at least one Cup victory.
Busch is winless in the last 45 races. This season has been a litany of misfortune for the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing team. It’s ranged from falling .007 seconds short of winning at Atlanta in February to failing to finish five races — including four due to accidents — and not scoring a stage point in more than half the events this year.
Asked about the challenges he’s gone through, Busch acknowledged his Xfinity crash in February 2015 at Daytona that gave him a compound fracture of his lower right leg and a mid-foot fracture to his left foot. Busch missed the first 11 Cup races that season but went on to win the first of his two series titles that season.
“The injury was easy compared to this,” Busch said in response to a question from NBC Sports. “That was nothing. I’ll take that all day long if it means that same thing afterwards.”
Then he turned to his recent struggles.
“It’s tough,” he said. “When you have done as well as you’ve done and the success and the accolades and everything that you have and you get ran over and beat down, all that sort of stuff, it’s hard to get yourself back up again to go back out there.
“I’ve been down before, although probably never as long or as low as this has been, but there’s a lot of great people that are around me. Everybody on the 8 team has really put their arm around me and patted me on the back, like ‘We got you man.’
“We know we’re not doing the best right now, so we’re all trying to strive to get better and put ourselves in the spots that we all want to be in. It’s not due to a lack of effort. I know that. There’s plenty of hard work going around. It’s just a matter of being a little bit better at it, being a little bit smarter at it and trying to make the most of it.”
Busch is coming off a fourth-place finish at Michigan on Monday — his first top-five finish since April.
He said that “discussions that were happening back in April and May (at the shop) are just kind of starting to show us the fruits of that labor.
“Doing some more sim stuff behind the scenes, doing some more vehicle dynamic stuff behind the scenes … moving a little bit of people between teams, my team, the 3 team, just getting everything a little more aligned to where we feel like we can better achieve results.”
Car owner Richard Childress told NBC Sports in July that he was “more involved” in turning around the organization. He said at the time some changes would have to take place in the offseason. He acknowledged wanting to expand the team’s engineering department.
Busch, who ranks ninth on the all-time Cup wins list with 63, says being stronger mentally has helped him through his struggles.
“It seems like the harder I work, the harder I study, the harder I do is, the worse we are at the racetrack,” he said. “So sometimes you can build yourself the wrong way, I guess.
“It’s just a matter of taking a strong mental approach to it and being able to have the mindset of a champion and to go out there and take the good days when you can get the good days and try to let go of the bad ones when they happen but learn from them and move forward.”
To make the playoffs, Busch will have to do something he hasn’t done since 2008 — win a Cup race at Daytona or Darlington. He has one Cup win at each track and they both came in that season.
At Chicago in early July, Busch chuckled when he admitted that Daytona might be his best chance to win and make the playoffs “as crazy as that sounds.”
Then again, this year has been unlike any for Busch, who has more finishes of 25th or worse (10) than top 10 results (seven). Maybe this is the year he can score his second Cup win at Daytona or Darlington.
2. Opportunities and challenges
Although one race remains in the regular season after Daytona, Saturday night’s race is likely the best chance for many drivers to score the victory they need to make the playoffs.
Five of the last seven Daytona winners have yet to secure a playoff spot this season. They are Chris Buescher, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Austin Dillon, Austin Cindric and Michael McDowell.
“Speedway racing … (I) ended up on the end of a lot of the big ones with some bad luck along the way and just got to a point where I really did not look forward heading to those tracks,” said Buescher, who won this event last year. “What I’ll say is RFK (Racing) builds extremely fast Mustangs to go to those tracks. That has certainly made it a lot more enjoyable, but there is a higher luck factor when we go to those.
“We talk about that quite a bit. You can’t make all your own luck there. There is a matter of being in the right place at the right time simply by circumstance. Mistakes get made. Everyone is a little bit more desperate as it comes down to it.
“That race definitely has the ability to get a lot more wild, especially as we get into the closing laps. We’ve had these conversations there through the years of how do you run hard, be smart in the stages, try and capture stage points, but ultimately know that with 10, 15 to go, it’s going to get wild.”
Ross Chastain, who enters Saturday, holding the final playoff spot by one point on Bubba Wallace, understands the challenges ahead.
“You just have to know that if you finish bad, you get less points, and if you finish good in the stages and the race, then you get more points,” he said. “It’s just simple math.”
3. Oddities of NASCAR
Among the unique aspects of NASCAR is that it is not uncommon for a driver to race for one team while having already signed with another team beyond the current season.
What makes it especially tricky for drivers and crew chiefs is if they are making a change from one manufacturer to another. There gets to be a point when the driver and/or crew chief is shut out of some data to protect trade secrets.
This year, two drivers and two crew chiefs have already announced plans to move to a different team and manufacturer next year.
Michael McDowell and crew chief Travis Peterson will leave Front Row Motorsports (Ford) after this season for Spire Motorsports (Chevrolet).
Chase Briscoe will move from Stewart-Haas Racing (Ford) to Joe Gibbs Racing (Toyota).
Crew chief Rodney Childers will go from SHR (Ford) to Spire Motorsports (Chevrolet).
For McDowell, he’s trying to make the playoffs for the second year in a row while having less information because of his impending move to Spire, which was announced May 8.
“It’s been more challenging than I anticipated it being,” McDowell told NBC Sports. “ … There’s a lot of stakeholders, I think that’s what we call it in our sport, that have skin in the game and there’s a lot of information. It’s understandable, but it’s also frustrating at the same point because I’m still fighting hard, we’re still fighting hard to win races and make a playoff spot.
“Any time that you feel like you’re slightly hindered or handicapped because of … not getting information, not getting DIL (simulator) time, I don’t want to go into the weeds too far, but it’s tougher than I thought it was going to be and it’s been more of a ripple effect than I anticipated.”
McDowell, the 2021 Daytona 500 winner, needs to win either Saturday night’s race at Daytona or next week’s Southern 500 to earn a playoff spot.
4. How much engineering does a team have?
Stewart-Haas Racing provided the North Carolina Department of Commerce a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) notice this week stating that it will lay off up to 323 employees when the organization shuts down after this season.
In North Carolina, a company must provide written notice at least 60 days before a plant closure.
SHR’s letter stated that Gene Haas will purchase the partnership interest of co-owner Tony Stewart and that the new organization, Haas Factory Team, will employ about 90-100 employees.
SHR’s letter also listed each position and how many were in those positions.
More than 50 positions listed had aero, engineer, data or technical in the job title. That’s more than 17% of the team’s total workforce, which includes flight attendants (five), facilities housekeepers (two) and show car drivers (three), among various positions.
The team listed 12 race engineers and four positions titled third race engineer. The team also listed six engineering interns, four design engineers, three aero CFD design engineers, two vehicle dynamics engineers and a simulation engineer.
Other engineering roles included aerodynamics design engineer, CFD design engineer, metrology support engineer, data support engineer and engineering director.
5. NASCAR response to Corey LaJoie’s crash
NASCAR informed teams this week that it will mandate a new right side rear window air deflector beginning this week at Daytona.
The move is in response to Corey LaJoie’s car going upside down at Michigan.
The air deflector for the right side of the car matches what is run on the left side of the rear window. The deflector increases the speed needed to lift the car in the air in the early part of the spin.
After slight contact at Michigan with Noah Gragson, LaJoie’s car turned and quickly turned upside down. LaJoie’s car slid down the backstretch on its roof, hitting the inside SAFER barrier. The car tumbled when it reached the infield grass in Turn 3. LaJoie walked away from the accident.
LaJoie said this week on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that his mouthpiece sensor recorded a 30 G-force spike when he flipped through the grass.
LaJoie is among a number of drivers who wear the mouthpiece sensor, which records the impact the head experiences in the car.
“The car saw a little bit less Gs than that, so it’s just from your head smacking between the headrests of where you see a bit more G-load on the mouthpiece vs. the car,” LaJoie said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.