It’s the NASCAR news of the year.
Kyle Busch will drive the No. 8 Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing for the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season and beyond. Busch is now partnered with Richard Childress, a man he’s had a well-documented beef with, and he’s paired with Chevrolet after having a tight partnership with Toyota for the last decade-and-a-half.
As long as the odds were for this to happen, it has come to reality. Busch moves to RCR an organization that hasn’t seen victory lane as regularly as he’s used to and an organization that hasn’t won a Cup Series championship since Dale Earnhardt’s seventh and final championship in 1994.
Busch is a two-time Cup champion and would have been a good bet to add more championship trophies to his mantle had he stayed at Joe Gibbs Racing. But will he win a championship with RCR? Joy Tomlinson and Luken Glover discuss this topic.
No, Kyle Busch will not win a championship with RCR.
Let’s pump the brakes on this kind of thinking. First, Busch is no spring chicken; he’s 37 years old and has been mostly full-time in Cup since 2005. I mean, yes, he’s won 60 races and earned two titles. But it doesn’t appear that he’s a title contender now, at least the last few years.
This year his lone win (so far) came at the Bristol Motor Speedway dirt track after Chase Briscoe got into Tyler Reddick, spinning them both and allowing Busch to slip on by on the last corner. Not exactly one where he showed a lot of strength on his way to victory.
Also, when he does win, it’s few and far between. His last victory before Bristol was at Pocono Raceway last June. Busch took the checkered flag at Kansas Speedway that May, too — his first win since fall 2020 at Texas Motor Speedway. That Texas triumph, which came on a Wednesday, was nearly a year after he won the 2019 championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Often when a driver wins multiple times a season, they’ll also lead quite a bit of laps. Well, Busch only led 334 laps last year and 516 in 2020. This year so far, he was out front for 624 circuits. In contrast, from 2016-2019, he led well over 1,000 laps each season, including 2,023 in 2017. That’s quite a difference over the last few years.
Additionally, his average finish is one of the worst it’s been at 16.5 through 28 races, compared to 12.8 in 2021 and 14.5 in 2020. Plus, he’s ranked 13th in points — the worst he’s been in 10 years.
He even struggled in the Camping World Truck…
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