Denny Hamlin Deems Kyle Busch ‘Non-existent’ With a Harsh 3-Word Claim on Rowdy’s Darlington Struggles

Kyle Busch is possibly having the worst start to his Cup Series campaign in 2024 with Richard Childress Racing. After the Darlington race, the regular season has reached its halfway point. And going by the results of the No. 8 RCR, their chances to make it into the playoffs seem bleak. After two back-to-back Top-10 and Top-5 finishes in the previous two races, the Goodyear 400 event was expected to be a turning point in Rowdy’s season. However, it proved to be quite the opposite, as the two-time champion struggled throughout the entire race, before settling with a disappointing P27 finish.

However, besides fans and other industry experts, the one who was the most surprised by Rowdy’s form, or the lack thereof, was Denny Hamlin. In the recent episode of the Action’s Detrimental podcast, the Joe Gibbs Racing star didn’t hold back from speaking his mind about Busch’s torrid run in 2024. This only added to the scrutiny RCR is going through for failing to back their star driver.

Denny Hamlin is not impressed

‘The Lady in Black’ hasn’t been Rowdy’s favorite place to visit in recent years. In his last four starts at the racetrack, he only has a single top-10 finish, with a win at the venue coming way back in 2008. Trying to tame the track in 2024, he started the weekend with the Truck race, which ended in a DNF finish. He was battling for the win against Corey Heim, but got loose on turn 2, hitting the bump and crashing his truck into the wall.

Hamlin, who himself finished P4 last weekend and sits pretty in the points standings on third position with three wins and five Top-5s, tried to explain the reasoning behind Busch’s dire run in the Truck event. “Yeah, Kyle same thing, just got loose in Turn 2. There’s a big a** bump off turn 2 that you gotta be careful of if you are running on the bottom, and it bit Kyle, who was non-existent yesterday, holy sh*t. He was bad, right? Bad all day,” the JGR racer opined.

So naturally, tensions have been simmering at the RCR camp for quite some time now. After transitioning to RCR, ahead of the 2023 season, looking for a positive change, even Busch himself couldn’t hold back from throwing a sly sarcastic jibe at his team after his P4 finish at Dover a few weeks ago. “A good solid points day, I guess. That’s a normal day, I’d love to have a lot more normal days, we can’t seem to get any,” he had shared at the time.

Well, this was at the time when he was scoring points and finishing the race on a high. It is hard to imagine his state of mind after the nightmare week he endured at Darlington. It’s hard to single out the root cause in determining what’s holding the two-time champ from reaching his previous heights. But it seems like the Next Gen car has a lot to do with it.

Kyle Busch wants RCR to crack the Next Gen code

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The Next Gen car has always been under the scrutiny of the driver, and Busch has been at the forefront of it. However, looking at how other teams like JGR and HMS have seemed to adapt to the new changes, RCR just hasn’t been on the same page in catching the new trend. Busch himself accepted his struggles with the new race and highlighted the key difference in comparing it with the old car.

“It definitely drives different than the old car. What that is I’m not exactly sure. I mean, it seems when you lead into the corner, the right front is outside the right rear, the car is much tighter. When you get to the center of the corner, right front is inside the rear, and coming down, it’s much looser. So trying to find that balance of that is been difficult,” Busch said in the pre-race interview.

Furthermore, he also revealed, “I feel like I’m fighting many more balance issues. 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.”

Evidently, ever since the Next Gen car debuted in 2022, the RCR racer has struggled with maintaining high finishes. In the last two seasons, the driver even struggled to make it to the Top-10 in the points standings, finishing P13 in 2022, and P14 in 2o23. Even wins have been hard to come by as Rowdy finished 2022 with one win and eight Top-5’s in 36 races. On the contrary, 2o23 seemed to be slightly better with three wins and 10 Top-5’s. Still, for a two-time Cup Series champion to be struggling to even break into the Top-5 in standings is definitely not a good sight. After the conclusion of the Darlington race, the #8 driver sits at P13 in the points standings.

It will be interesting to see RCR’s next course of action after the All-Star race weekend. Hopefully, the team will be able to grasp