At this point, one has to wonder if Kyle Busch shattered a mirror, to receive such tremendous bad luck. He has now gone 60 races without a Cup Series win. The 2024 season was perhaps the rock bottom Rowdy had hit in his NASCAR career. Winless, couldn’t advance to playoffs, and his 19-year one-win-per-year streak also ended. With his back against the wall, Busch entered the new year with the hopes of turning the corner for good.

At the Circuit of the Americas, Busch was in a position to finally get the monkey off his back. Unfortunately, an ill-timed caution and fading tires contributed to him slipping down to finish 5th. Once again, it was oh so close, yet so far for the #8 driver. On the flip side, Christopher Bell who had a runner-up finish last year on the track was successful in getting past Rowdy for back-to-back wins since the start of the season

Busch’s woes began right at the beginning at the Daytona 500. This was one trophy that eluded him for a long time, and continues to do so to this day. He was right up among the leaders, before getting caught up in a late wreck.  A week later at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, he could only muster 7th fastest, and now he was 5th at COTA. It is as if he just can’t catch a good break, and most of us were expecting an animated Kyle Busch to see another win slip out of his grasp. But his post-race confession took everyone by surprise.

Kyle Busch chose not to dwell on his failure

Of course, one wouldn’t blame Busch for wallowing in misery and kicking himself. Instead, the veteran driver chose to look on the positives to glean from the weekend. He told Wendy Venturini, “If we can keep getting top fives and leading laps like that, the wins will comes. That was it on pushing the car. I just wish that maybe we had equal tires to the 20. I don’t know if that was the difference or what.”

According to him, the only reason he lost out on the win, was because of fading grip. As a result, he was just a sitting duck when Bell, Byron, Reddick and Elliott charged past on fresher tires. The Richard Childress Racing driver also admitted that during his robust defence against Bell, he bent a toelink and that hampered him. “I just wish we had equal tires to the 20. Once we had that yellow, you’re just in defense mode. Hated the contact in two and three bent the toe link.”

Well, we’ve seen the two drivers trade blows at COTA before. Last year, Bell didn’t exercise caution in his approach to march up the field and spun Busch. What followed next was a stern warning by the RCR star in a typical Rowdy manner. And Bell certainly reminded himself of the past altercation when he was trying to thread the needle for the lead late in the race.

“I didn’t want to do that again. And I wasn’t going to put myself in jeopardy to make contact and ruin his race. But I don’t think it affected how I raced him or anything. I just was trying to put the pressure on him, and you know, his tires eventually gave up.” Bell shared after the race.

Where did things go wrong for the RCR driver?

During the third and final stage, Busch was leading and had a healthy 2.5 second lead to William Byron in 2nd. Meanwhile, Bell was 5 seconds adrift, and it finally looked like the 2-time Cup champion could win. Then, fate decided to be a cruel mistress, as a late caution flag waved.

The ones who brought it out were Austin Dillon and Denny Hamlin when the two collided. Ironically, Dillon is Busch’s teammate, and Hamlin is Bell’s teammate. Make of that what you will, but the end result was that Byron and Bell closed right up to Kyle Busch. What made things worse was that the two had pitted later than the #8 driver, and had a fresher set of Goodyear tires on their race cars.

On the restart, Busch’s ties were still in decent condition, so he was able to pull away for a bit. Eventually, the race wore on and so did Kyle Busch’s tires, and that was when the #20 driver reeled him in. “And he slipped getting into, I think it’s 15, and allowed me to get inside of him, and then the race was on from there,” Bell explained. Now, some conspiracy theories are going on that Hamlin deliberately brought out the caution so that his teammate could close in on Rowdy.

We know that Hamlin isn’t a road racing specialist and he wouldn’t want to dig a hole for himself by losing points on the table. If anything, SVG from the Chevy camp had the best shot with the fresh tires out of the leaders but even he couldn’t make the most of it. But after the dust settled, it’s Bell who has another win in his bag and is on the verge of making history next weekend at Phoenix Raceway.