(Photo: Wayne Riegle | The Podium Finish)
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — Kyle Busch has one goal in mind before the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs commence at Darlington Raceway: “stop the bleeding.”
Busch has finished outside the top 20 in four of the last five races, including three results of 36th or worse. He missed it at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, hit the wall in both practice and qualifying and crashed out early. Bad pit stops led to a 21st-place finish at Pocono Raceway. At Michigan International Speedway, he spun and hit the wall in Stage 1 and finished last. Last week at Indianapolis, he unexplainably broke a valve spring and limped home two laps down.
In the midst of it all, the No. 8 team discovered gains on its short-track package at Richmond Raceway and finished third.
Busch believes in luck — both bad and good. With two races remaining in the regular season, he hopes those misfortunes will turn around.
“The mindset is to stop the bleeding,” Busch said at Watkins Glen International on Saturday. “You know we have to figure out a way of being able to bounce back in races, which we were. We had some good luck on our side, some good fortune. Maybe we used it all up, but the fact of the matter is when things kind of go awry, it just seems to snowball from there and we’re not able to stop the bleeding. That’s kind of been our way.
“We were third in points – 30 (points) from the lead and looking for the regular season championship seven weeks ago, and now I don’t even know where we are. I stopped paying attention because I know it’s not good.”
Up until New Hampshire in mid-July, Busch had been on his best run of the season. Busch had recorded top 10s in seven consecutive races, including a win at WWT Raceway. He even bounced back to finish fifth at the Chicago Street Course after nosing into a tire barrier. He won the second race of the season at Auto Club Speedway and survived chaos in NASCAR Overtime to win at Talladega Superspeedway.
Since finishing fifth at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Busch has dropped eight spots to 11th in points. His average finish is down to 14.4.
(Photo: Josh Jones | The Podium Finish)
“The frustration of just life in general – luck, karma and whatever all the rest of that stuff is. Like I just don’t know anymore … I don’t know what to do to change it,” Busch said. “There’s all the rabbits’ feet in the world, all the four-leaf clovers and everything else – a lot of people say that they don’t believe in luck … there is luck, trust me.
“I’ve had talks like this with (Matt) Kenseth before and Carl (Edwards) before – where you go winless seasons and you just wonder what’s not working and there’s nothing that you can pinpoint yourself to. Martin Truex Jr., him and I talked about it before, where it’s like – man, you just have to wait … you just have to wait until it turns around and eventually, it’ll turn around and it’ll be fine.”
Busch’s three victories this season match the total set by the No. 8 team last year with Tyler Reddick behind the wheel. Two of Reddick’s wins came on road courses, which gives Busch encouragement ahead of Sunday’s race at Watkins Glen.
But all things considered, Busch feels like the ingredients are there to spark a championship run with RCR. He just needs to execute — and break the bad luck streak.
“We’re all fighting hard. We’re all pulling the rope in the same direction,” Busch said. “We’re all trying to continue to make sure we evolve forward and get ourselves where we want to be. Seven weeks ago, when we were third in points – if we could have taken third-place points into the playoffs.. those playoff points that you get with that, that would have been phenomenal. I don’t think that’s achievable today with where we’re at, but we’re going to go give it everything we’ve got to try and get back up the ladder a few in order to get some of those points because we know how important all that is when it comes to playoff time and each round gets reset.
“When you can run top-four, top-three each week, the wins will come. It just seems to be a lot harder to do that in this day in age with this car, the competition and everything else week-to-week-to-week. It’s a little bit more randomized than maybe what it used to be. But when you’re a really good team and you’re hitting on it all like William (Byron) was for 20 weeks, right? They were super strong. The No. 19 (Martin Truex Jr.) was super strong. So it can be done, it’s just a matter of doing it.”
Sunday’s Go Bowling at The Glen is set for 3 p.m. ET on USA Network, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. Denny Hamlin is on the pole. Busch will start ninth.
