Kyle Busch Takes Blame Away From Richard Childress & Co. as He Dissects Bittersweet RCR Season

Just 10 races into the season, 2x Cup Series champion Kyle Busch had already surpassed his 2022 win tally. By the time the 15th race came knocking, so did his third (and final) win of 2023. But what started as a dream season for the new pairing quickly turned south, and Busch could do little about it. With 7 races remaining, KB was smoked: “[no] front turn, front grip… rear spring loose… front still tight.” However, in retrospect, did Kyle Busch have a change of heart? Looks like it.  

As the season progressed, KB fans watched in despair as their hero slid down the order, succumbing to ill fate and the team’s inconsistency. But following his Round of 12 elimination, he absolved Richard Childress Racing of any blame for the way his season turned out—a 14th-place finish in the standings.

NASCAR’s “Rowdy” Kyle Busch takes the fall, saving his boss and team’s skin

After a lackluster final season with his long-time stable, Joe Gibbs Racing, which saw him finish the 2022 season with just 1 win, Kyle Busch came back looking to have a better campaign. And that he did, picking up three stellar wins, including the ones at the high-speed lanes of Talladega Superspeedway, Auto Club Speedway, and Gateway Motorsports Park. Despite the drop-off in the latter half of the season, the American reflected, “I would say we’ve had a really good year. You know, people kind of doubted the fact that us being able to move over to RCR and go out there and win races.”

Kyle Busch and RCR proved them wrong, though. However, the six DNFs made the ascend grueling as he had to fight through a point deficit with the sub-par RCR equipment. Despite the loss of momentum as, race after race, the #8 Chevy developed issues, Bush believes RCR has a “solid” year.

“Fortunately, we won three races this year, so we had a solid year. We had opportunities to win more, we just kind of missed out on them.” But as he said that, he couldn’t help but think of what could’ve been.

Kyle Busch got blunt and honest, saying, “I thought we really had a shot for the Round of 8. We’ve been working on a lot of those notes and really working on the feedback to make sure that we’re better prepared for next year. We had a lot of peaks and a lot of valleys. We had too many DNFs essentially that kind of knocked us down.” That’s where he took the blame for his team. “We’ve got to clean up that. A lot of that’s on me, but we’ll get it better as we go and be better prepared for next year.“

Here’s a statistic about Kyle Busch’s racing career: His 13th-place finish in the 2022 standings was his lowest finish since 2012. Considering the success he saw in his 15-year stint with Joe Gibbs Racing, 2022 was an underwhelming final season with the team. With just one win under his name last year, Rowdy jumped ship to RCR, where 2023 wasn’t much better. Above and beyond the narratives that situate the blame game on either KB-JGR or KB-RCR dynamic, Rowdy thinks his career “demise” is the inevitable advent of NextGen cars.

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“With me and this Next Gen car”: Kyle Busch blames himself, most of all

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KB revealed that he needed to change his mindset and driving style. As reported by Orlando Sentinel, “Rowdy” said, “With this car, equipment, talent and everything being so equal, the SMT data – everybody seeing it and being so equal – it’s tougher than ever to pass the guy in front of you. So, I guess that’s kind of been a bit of my demise, which is I don’t feel like I can do as much as I want to be able to do.”

“Me overtrying has sort of hurt my race craft, if you will, and (why) I haven’t been finishing, frankly,” he added. Six DNFs and spinning out of races all on his own aren’t characteristic of Busch. But this has been the case recently, especially after the introduction of the Next Gen car in 2022. Since then, his performances have been erratic, and that’s exactly what he’ll be working on.

“With me and this Next Gen car, look at how many times I’ve spun out and crashed. It’s just stupid compared to what it has been over time. I still have some work to do on figuring that out,” said Busch, with his focus firmly set on the 2024 season.

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