Iowa Speedway was supposed to be a strong point for Kyle Busch. He has an Xfinity win and another runner-up finish at the 0.875-mile short track. Busch even qualified in the seventh position- his best starting position in the last five races. Throughout the inaugural Cup Series race, Busch and his team showed promise. He was running well and looked likely to grab a top-ten spot, but mechanical issues plagued the RCR #8 team, not once, but twice.

63-time NASCAR Cup Series winner, Kyle Busch, is undergoing his worst career slump. The Iowa Corn 350 marked the 38th race the Richard Childress Racing driver failed to conquer in a row. Busch’s woes have been partly due to troubles with his pit team, which has been shuffled several times this season. But another reason may be the Next-Gen car. Being introduced in 2022, this novel Cup car is much different from the older models.

Kyle Busch calls out NASCAR’s car rule…

One primary point of difference was seen by NASCAR for the first time in history. The Next Gen cars are built with standardized parts. This means the teams need to rely on single-source suppliers for car parts. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be working well for Busch; and being the outspoken personality he’s known to be, he was quick to assert it.

Initially, Busch pitted, thinking that he had a left rear tire going down, but it turned out to be a suspension problem. But when he restarted on lap 272 inside the top ten, he hit the wall, and then a larger issue was uncovered. Post-race, Kyle Busch, talking to Frontstretch, squarely blamed it on the Cup car. “Next Gen parts and pieces broke.” He further explained the problems, “So I don’t know what it was exactly…if it was the toe link or something that changed in the left rear that bent or broke and just changed the driveability of the car…I came in and fixed that, went back out and broke the power steering belt. I don’t know, no idea why.” 

Yet Kyle Busch wasn’t all whiny and analyzed his own mistakes as well. “I was not very sporty. We were holding on and doing okay. I was so loose getting into the corners, I was crashing every lap just trying to hold on. But we were keeping enough track position to kind of keep our name in the game. We had that vibration earlier that we pitted for, got off sequence. That didn’t ruin our day at least.”

While RCR has been blamed the entire season, Kyle Busch felt sad about his team and shifted the blame away. “Just a bunch of issues, just real frustrated…Hate it for the guys…wish we had a better result. I felt like we had a top-ten car. ” When the press asked him if the team could work on these issues, Busch again rotated back to the Next-Gen problem. “You can’t build your own parts. So, I mean, I don’t know.”

This loss relegated Busch 31 points below the playoff cut line. Even though the Iowa race further jeopardized Kyle Busch’s playoff ambitions, the driver stood by his team.

Kyle Busch is not backing the JGR rumors!

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After Stewart-Haas Racing’s news of exit, a massive overhaul is going on in the NASCAR Cup garage. It touched Joe Gibbs Racing as well, as Martin Truex Jr finally announced his retirement. This caused a lot of opportunities for drivers like SHR’s Chase Briscoe and Noah Gragson, and speculations caught RCR’s Kyle Busch as well.

A rumor sailed that Busch might rejoin his old team barely two years after parting ways with Joe Gibbs. However, in a recent pre-Iowa interview, Busch debunked this.

Despite displaying flexibility for his old teams like JGR or Hendrick Motorsports, Kyle Busch ultimately favored his present team. “I would say anything’s possible, always. 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.”

Kyle Busch stands at risk of losing his playoff chances for 2024. We can only wait and see if the star driver can get back in form and in time.