Kyle Busch finds new life with new team, but not title shot

It was the summer of 2022, and for the first time since anybody could remember, Kyle Busch appeared to be going nowhere fast.

He had lost his sponsor and then his ride with one of NASCAR’s marquee teams and — dare he say it — perhaps even his mojo.

“I never doubted myself — but sometimes you do,” the 38-year-old lead-foot said about circumstances beyond his control that lowered the curtain on an auspicious 15-year run with Joe Gibbs Racing and turned him into a free agent against his wishes.

“You kind of get down. You wonder what’s going on and what’s happening …”

But when he said that, Busch was standing at the start-finish line at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, earlier this year, some 225 miles down Interstate 15 from the Las Vegas Bullring where he first began driving in circles faster than anybody around here had ever seen.

He had just finished three seconds ahead of Chase Elliott for the 61st victory of his vaunted Cup Series career in just his second start since joining Richard Childress Racing.

The week before, he was on the verge of breaking through for his first Daytona 500 victory in his maiden voyage with his new team before being involved in a crash that, like his sponsors pulling out and Gibbs cutting him loose, also was beyond his control.

They say what goes around eventually comes around on the track. But not even Busch, never one to lack assurance and élan behind the wheel, expected to come around quite this quickly.

“Truthfully, no,” said the two-time Cup Series champion after breaking the legendary Richard Petty’s record by visiting victory lane for the 19th consecutive season in the vaunted Cup Series. “I felt there was going to be a little bit of a learning experience (with a new team).”

He wasn’t the only one who believed that.

The skeptics who raised an eyebrow when Busch decided to join forces with Childress were thicker than the grease under a pit crew’s fingernails despite RCR drivers having won 112 Cup races since 1969 and six NASCAR championships. All were with the irascible Dale Earnhardt in the driver’s seat.

But the last came in 1994. The team had slipped several rungs on the NASCAR ladder until showing a flash of resurgence in 2022 when young Tyler Reddick won three races in his third full season with the team.

But Reddick apparently was not as convinced as Busch that RCR had turned the proverbial corner. Midway through the 2022 season, he announced he would be leaving Childress to join 23XI Racing (headed by basketball luminary Michael Jordan and NASCAR star Denny Hamlin) for the 2024 season.

That decision touched off a frenzied game of motorized musical chairs that ultimately led Busch to Childress’ doorstep and RCR allowing Reddick out of his contract to replace Kurt Busch, Kyle’s older brother, at 23XI. The 2004 NASCAR champion was forced to retire from full-time racing after suffering a concussion in a midseason qualifying crash at Pocono, Pennsylvania, with his convalescence setting in motion a seismic three-way driver shuffle.

And just like that, there was Kyle Busch standing in victory lane beside an unfamiliar car while sporting an unfamiliar driving suit, once again confounding naysayers, if not his on-track rivals.

Chocolate-covered mess

“Why is anyone surprised by this?” fan favorite Elliott said after finishing second to Busch. “Kyle is fantastic, one of the best to ever do this. That didn’t change overnight, so I’m not surprised — and anybody who is should rethink their NASCAR knowledge, in my opinion.”

Kyle Larson, the 2021 Cup Series champion and one of the (few?) drivers with whom Busch has always gotten along, took to social media to congratulate him: “Couldn’t be more happy for @KyleBusch. The guy is one of the best race car drivers of all time and will always be. I’m glad it only took him two races to remind the world.”

Whereas most of his 63 Cup Series victories and a NASCAR record 229 altogether counting his triumphs in the Truck and Xfinity Series have been greeted with a smattering of boos, the crowd at Fontana cheered enthusiastically when Busch removed his helmet.

For most of his career, his success and impertinence on the track — his nickname is “Rowdy” after all — had polarized many NASCAR fans. But now virtually all were in Busch’s corner after Mars Incorporated, parent company of his longtime sponsor M&Ms, said it would be pulling out of the sport, transforming his 2022 season and racing future into a chocolate-covered mess.

Despite steering his familiar No. 18 Toyota to two Cup Series championships and dozens of victories during a sustained run with Joe Gibbs Racing that most believed would never end, the Super Bowl-winning coach decided to let him go when another sponsor could not be secured to offset Busch’s reported $16 million salary.

The development sent shock waves around the circuit. It also created an opening at JGR for a young driver who could be had at a much cheaper price – and just so happened to share the surname of the team owner as Ty Gibbs, Joe’s grandson, inherited Busch’s seat in the renumbered No. 54 entry.

Neither side said very much during negotiations to keep Busch at JGR, and their breakup was mostly described as amicable. But there were signs Busch’s frustration was growing the longer his situation festered without resolution. During his postrace TV interview at Pocono where his brother was injured, he barely acknowledged Gibbs when his boss tugged him on the elbow as if to say “good job.”

Then in September when it became clear that he would not be returning to JGR, Busch finally sounded off during a TV series chronicling the playoff chase in which he would be eliminated following the first round – his earliest departure while driving for Gibbs.

“Something that is so disappointing to me, and so hurtful about this whole situation with JGR, is they were like family,” Busch said on NBC’s “Race for the Championship.”

“For 15 years, Joe had my back in (my) stupidest of moments. Like, he was there for me, and (now) it’s gone. It just flipped, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever been a part of.”

Peace offering

As it turned out, the relationship between Busch and his new car owner would necessitate a good deal of flipping as well.

NASCAR fans may recall fisticuffs breaking out between Busch and Richard Childress following a 2011 Truck Series race at Kansas Speedway after the former had purposely rammed into one of the latter’s drivers after the checkered flag.

“Hold my watch,” Childress famously said upon removing his Rolex and punching and putting into a headlock the man who would become his new driver.

When it comes to making strange bedfellows, politics have nothing on big-time stock car racing.

During the news conference that announced Busch’s signing, the car owner presented the sport’s winningest driver across NASCAR’s top three divisions (Cup, Xfinity, Truck) by presenting Busch with a similar timepiece in a familiar green box, thus serving notice that bygones officially were just that.

The two immediately hit it off this time by combining for three wins in the first 15 races of the 2023 season — the same number of victories Busch accumulated over his final 74 races at Gibbs.

The confetti and sports drink shower at California combined with two more at high-speed Talladega Superspeedway and the more middling World Wide Technology Speedway across the river from St. Louis stamped Busch as a contender for his third Cup championship by early June.

Four more top 10s were to follow before Busch hit a rough patch that saw him finish 36th, 21st, 37th and 36th in four of his next five starts.

“I just don’t know anymore,” he wrote in a social media post. That was as close as Busch came (at least publicly) to expressing a grievance as his No. 8 Chevrolet continued to suffer reliability issues and a lack of cooperation from the capricious auto racing gods.

But as the playoffs came into focus he still was able to hold his chin up. Unlike during the abysmal 2022 season, Busch said he had reason to be encouraged.

“My confidence is high and I like the group and the stuff we do and the philosophies and the ideas and what we learn and all of that stuff. It’s just a matter of putting it all together and running smooth,” a pleasant Busch said before the penultimate race of the regular season at Watkins Glen.

But the inconsistency that plagued him after his quick regular-season start ultimately ended Busch’s championship aspirations after the second tier of playoff races.

Crashes in back-to-back starts put him in a must-win situation last week on the Charlotte “roval,” and he nearly pulled another rabbit from his hat off before settling for third place. With the championship field having been sliced in half to eight, Busch will be cast in the spoiler’s role in Sunday’s South Point 400 on his hometown track at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Despite the late summer slide, Busch finished fifth in regular-season points and his three wins tied for the second most behind William Byron, who won five times ahead of the playoffs in a breakout season. Busch also started the postseason five slots ahead of Reddick, the man he replaced at RCR, while brash Ty Gibbs failed to make the playoffs after inheriting Busch’s seat.

But because all things in auto racing are never equal (owing to the budgets and resources of the various race teams), it is said the only guy you really have to beat is your teammate.

Busch’s teammate at Childress, 2018 Daytona 500 winner Austin Dillon (and the grandson of the man who signs their checks) finished 29th in regular-season points — a distant 24 spots behind the man he reached out to last year to inquire about his possible interest in a change of scenery.

All in the family

In addition to gaining new sponsors, a new car number and some newfound respect from NASCAR fans after hitting the ground running at Childress — he was perceived as the good guy in the futile contract negotiations at Gibbs — Busch also lost his abbreviation from the ubiquitous TV ticker graphic.

“When I saw some of my paint scheme renderings for the new year, they didn’t have my first name on them anymore, just my last name,” the former ‘Ky’ Busch said about ‘Ku’ Busch, which is how the brothers have been identified in the TV running order since Kyle made his Cup debut at LVMS in 2004.

Kyle Busch was standing at the back of the Daytona media center before the regular-season finale when Kurt Busch, 45, confirmed that his long layoff from the crash at Pocono last summer would become a full-fledged retirement. He was last in the queue of NASCAR drivers and officials who gathered to wish Kurt well, and the two exchanged a warm bro-hug.

But it probably won’t be too much longer before ‘Br’ Busch — Kyle’s precocious son Brexton — puts the TV graphics crew back to work. Despite standing only knee-high to a gearshift, 8-year-old Brexton Busch is accumulating the kind of on-track success that suggests he has inherited the same heavy right foot that has carried his father to the top of his profession.

In fact, his old man is so confident that Brexton will follow in his tire tracks that he has made his progression up the racing ladder a significant part of his retirement plan.

“I’ve kind of dreamt this up a little bit,” the proud and doting papa said during a recent guest spot on satellite radio. “In a perfect world, I will retire from Cup racing when Brexton is 15 years old, and I would go run a full Truck Series season to see if I could win a Truck Series championship, because then I would have become the first to win all three series (Cup, Xfinity, Truck) in NASCAR.

“When Brexton turns 15, he and I could split (driving duties in) that truck, where he could run the shorter track races and I could run the bigger tracks because you have to be 18 to run the big tracks. Then when he takes it over, I’m out, I’m done, that would be it for me.”

In the perfect world in which Kyle Busch makes left hand turns — and now an increasing number of right ones, owing to the myriad road and street circuits that have been added to the schedule — that would make Kyle 49 when he announces his full-time retirement from NASCAR.

“That’s the dream, and I’ve got to make the dream a reality, but we’re working on that,” he said of landing on all four tires with Richard Childress’ race team. “I gotta have that life-after-racing plan, and I don’t have that one set yet. But if my Cup career is going to end in the next six or seven years, time is ticking.”