DARLINGTON, S.C. — Two-time Cup champion Kyle Busch admits he’s not faced a challenge like the Next Gen car.
Driving it, he says, leads to a “new realm of confusion.”
As the Cup regular season reaches its midpoint this weekend at Darlington Raceway, Busch is 14th in the standings for the 16-car field.
Busch talked Friday about the challenges he’s had with this car and the struggles in what has been a rollercoaster season for he and his team.
“I feel like I’m fighting many more balance issues,” Busch said at Darlington Raceway. “And on top of fighting those balance issues by yourself, throw in the aero deficiencies that you have in traffic and now you’re just confused. You think that you’re going to expect it to do one thing, and it does something else and you lose a tenth of a second because you’re trying to garner that feel of what it is.
“We’re literally all grasping at half of a tenth of a second to be the best car on the racetrack. Many of our pace studies that come out after these races -– two-tenths is the difference between first and 25th. So you’re literally grasping at very small gains to move yourself up that pylon.”
Busch further explained the confusion with the car.
“I think the last time we had this much confusion was when we had the high downforce package on the Cup cars — the old Cup car where you didn’t know if you wanted to be the downforce guy or the less drag guy at the different racetracks, you know,” Busch said. “So like, I think (Martin) Truex (Jr.), if I remember right, like they poured all the downforce on his cars and he was fast his way, and they made Denny’s (Hamlin) cars less drag and he was fast that way.
“So it was like – OK but which way is the way, you know? I think that was the last time I was confused. But that’s just car build stuff, not even lap-to-lap as you’re going through the turns with your balance issues and aero issues that you have.”
Even with those issues, Busch goes into this weekend with back-to-back top 10s — something he hadn’t accomplished this season until now. He also has started in the top five in the last three races, a feat he last achieved in 2021.
“I felt like the last two weeks at Dover and Kansas, we were respectable; contenders and much closer,” Busch said of finishing fourth at Dover and eighth at Kansas. “That was a nice change of pace. We were consistent top-five runners. Being a consistent top-five runner; get those top-five finishes and then that consistency will build into putting yourself in the right place, at the right time, in the end of these races to get a win.”
