Livescore
These should be the happy, golden years for Kyle Busch — and Richmond Raceway normally would be the perfect place to celebrate the greatness of NASCAR‘s greatest lightning rod.
Love him or hate him, Busch is the most polarizing superstar of his generation, and the 0.75-mile oval in Virginia‘s capital city has been the flashpoint for many episodes in which he has been the straw that stirred the drink in stock-car racing‘s major leagues.
In May 2008, he punted Dale Earnhardt Jr. from the lead in the closing laps, igniting the ire of millions supporting NASCAR‘s most popular driver. On May 2, 2009, Busch celebrated his 24th birthday with the first of four consecutive spring victories at Richmond.
MORE: Busch-Dale Jr. contact in closing laps at Richmond in 2008
In the 2012 regular-season finale at Richmond, he missed the playoffs in an epically tense battle with Jeff Gordon for the final postseason berth, and Busch was controversially on the wrong end of a last-lap bump from the lead by Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Carl Edwards in April 2016.
Coming off a two-week break into a race weekend at Richmond, where he has 28 top 10s and six wins (second only to his eight at Bristol), this track normally would be an excellent opportunity for talking up Busch as a favorite to extend his streak of consecutive winning seasons to 20.
Instead, Busch is mired in a career-long, 43-race winless skid with four races remaining in the regular season and in jeopardy of failing to make the playoffs for the first time in 12 years. And those hard truths are accompanied by the jarring reality that a disappointing 2024 season isn‘t an anomaly.
It‘s possibly only the latest excruciating chapter in a slow-motion slide that seems inconceivable for a once-consistent top newsmaker — and one of just two active multi-time champions — who now barely seems to matter on the track most weeks.
As Busch infamously and dismissively said to Ricky Stenhouse Jr. after their All-Star Race brawl at North Wilkesboro Speedway, “I suck just as bad as you.”
MORE: Busch, Stenhouse throw punches post-All-Star Race
It‘s a cruel twist for a driver known for obsessively studying his place in history. When he was on the cusp of his 200th national series win in NASCAR six years ago, Busch revealed some deep research into Richard Petty‘s 200 Cup victories.
So surely, Busch knows that his baffling slump is an outlier for a Cup champion in middle age.
He turned 39 three months ago, a mythical age in NASCAR that often has signified when stars tend to enter their prime years of production. Denny Hamlin, Martin Truex Jr. and Brad Keselowski (who ended a three-year victory drought in May at Darlington) are Busch‘s contemporaries who have borne out that trend.
Consider that after his only winless Cup season in 2018, Hamlin catapulted into a career resurrection by amassing 23 of his 54 victories since turning 38. Hamlin, who will turn 44 in three months, remains in the thick of a six-year run as a perennial championship contender at the peak of his powers to blend confidence, experience and skill.
For Busch, his former Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, it‘s the opposite trajectory.
At a time when he should be entering a sweet spot during his 20th season in NASCAR‘s premier series, winning seems further away than ever and with little hope of recapturing his 2015-19 dominance of two championships and a record five consecutive appearances in the Championship 4.
His second crown came during a 2019 season of five victories but none between June 2 and the Nov. 17 title clincher at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Busch mightily wrestled with a lower horsepower package that he openly detested, and though he still claimed the ultimate prize, it portended a demoralizing stretch.
Over the next five seasons, the engine, setups and car would change in Cup, yet the tumult remained for Busch. In 2020, he split with crew chief Adam Stevens after a one-win season. After a slight rebound the next year, 2022 was a summer of sleepless nights about the future during an agonizingly prolonged split from Joe Gibbs Racing that took months to finalize.
A move to Richard Childress Racing last year brought three victories in barely four months. But it was followed by a late-season fade to 14th in the points standings that makes 2023 now appear a false spring that led into an even deeper winter of Busch‘s discontent.
He still can create headlines, but those moments now happen in the middle of the pack, such as the feud with Stenhouse. Or the Pocono dustup with Corey LaJoie that had Busch vowing retribution on “The Pat McAfee Show” (a guest appearance that highlighted Busch‘s enduring appeal).
Was that another frustrating reminder of what a slog this season had become?
“Sure,” Busch said during an Indianapolis Motor Speedway media availability that yielded several one-word answers.
A day later, he spun while trying to hang onto a strategy-driven top 10, triggering the yellow flag that set up the double-overtime finish to the Brickyard 400.
That‘s as close as Busch‘s No. 8 Chevrolet often gets lately to being consequential. Because of crashes or a mechanical failure, he has failed to finish five of the past eight races. He is three months removed from his last top five and on pace for career worsts in virtually every major statistical category.
To his clear-eyed credit, he has been blunt about his mediocrity. Busch never sugar-coats his outlook, which can make his interviews sometimes feel like cries for help.
“I would say anything‘s possible, always,” Busch said when asked in mid-June if he could return to JGR, where he raced from 2008-22 after starting his Cup career with three seasons at Hendrick Motorsports. “Certainly, if I was welcomed, I would go back. If Hendrick welcomed me back, I would go back, but right now I‘m at RCR with my group of guys and the deal that I have right now in place, so we‘re trying to work and build this program and make RCR great again.”
Furiously trying to achieve that, RCR has made major competition changes while promising more to come.
But in the meantime, Busch can do little but wait — and hope — for improvement.
“It‘s been so dismal and so heartbreaking,” Busch said at Chicago last month. “I have a hard time dealing with enough stuff in my life that every Sunday to keep adding to it is getting harder and harder to deal with. Just got to keep going on to the next week and keep fighting on.”
Is a sudden rejuvenation on the horizon?
Or are we witnessing the premature twilight of a Hall of Fame career whose prime years are somehow on the precipice?
Richmond, a longtime gold standard for Busch, could begin to tell us a lot about whether his golden years are truly golden after all.
Nate Ryan has written about NASCAR since 1996 while working at the San Bernardino Sun, Richmond Times-Dispatch, USA TODAY and for the past 10 years at NBC Sports Digital. He is the host of the NASCAR on NBC Podcast and also has covered various other motorsports, including the IndyCar and IMSA series.
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