DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Kyle Busch is masking his disappointment. He’s hiding his frustration and walking through the NASCAR garage trying not to let anyone see how challenging this season has been for the two-time Cup Series champion.
“I’m a great actor, apparently,” he quipped.
Busch is winless in 45 races, his last victory coming at Gateway Park outside St. Louis on June 4, 2023. The growing skid has him in a precarious position heading into Saturday night’s race at Daytona International Speedway.
Busch needs to win one of the two regular-season races remaining — Daytona and Darlington — to secure a spot in the playoff field for the 12th consecutive year. He last missed the postseason in 2012.
“We could legit win Daytona,” Busch confidently said Thursday during a Zoom call, pointing to a 12th-place finish at the famed speedway in February, strong runs at similar tracks in Atlanta and Talladega and even a fourth-place showing last week at Michigan.
Maybe he’s putting a spin on the situation. After all, Busch has one win in 38 starts at the birthplace of NASCAR. Either way, the 39-year-old Busch didn’t try to conceal his discontent with how his season has unfolded.
“It’s tough because, when you have done as well as you’ve done and the success and the accolades and everything that you’ve had and you get run over, beat down, all that sort of stuff, it’s hard to get yourself back up again and to go back out there,” Busch said. “But I’ve been down before, although probably never as long or as low as this has been.”
Busch ranks 18th in the playoff standings, 93 points behind Bubba Wallace and 94 behind Ross Chastain, who has a tenuous grip on the final postseason spot.
Twelve drivers are locked into the 16-man playoff field thanks to wins: Kyle Larson, Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell, Tyler Reddick, William Byron, Ryan Blaney, Chase Elliott, Brad Keselowski, Austin Cindric, Joey Logano, Daniel Suarez and Alex Bowman.
Five other winless drivers are vying for the four remaining spots: Martin Truex Jr., Ty Gibbs, Chris Buescher, Chastain and Wallace.
“Daytona and Darlington are two good tracks for us,” Wallace said. “Just got to keep the flow going.”
Everyone else is in desperation mode. Always-chaotic Daytona has provided plenty of surprise winners in recent years — Buescher and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in 2023, Austin Dillon and Austin Cindric in 2022, Michael McDowell in 2021, Justin Haley in 2019 and Erik Jones in 2018.
“Seems like we all lose our mind at the end of races (at Daytona) and just hold the throttle down until we get to the front,” Stenhouse said.
Added Byron: “There’s a lot of luck involved, as we all know.”
So no one should be ruled out Saturday night — including Busch, whose lone victory at Daytona came in 2008.
“Fact of the matter is the better you run, the more consistent you run, it gives you that confidence going into each weekend that you can do it again,” he said.
Busch has more on the line than his playoff streak. He also holds the NASCAR record for the most consecutive years with a victory, a run that started in 2005.
He broke Hall of Famer Richard Petty’s mark of 18 in a row, which he set between 1960 and 1977. Because drivers eliminated from the playoffs still compete in the 10 postseason races, Busch has time to extend that record.
“You try to keep it going as long as you can,” Busch said. “You want to set that year mark as high as you possibly can, just to try to not let anybody ever get there again. Look at how many years it stood for Richard Petty before I was able to get it.”
NASCAR is mandating the use a right-side, rear-window air deflector at Daytona, a direct result of Corey LaJoie’s strange flip at Michigan International Speedway on Monday.
LaJoie’s No. 7 Chevrolet turned sideways, got airborne without making contact with another car and then landed on its roof and slid hundreds of feet before rolling once it touched the infield grass. He was uninjured.
“If they want to call it the ‘LaJoie fin,’ I’ll take an innovation for the car,” LaJoie said. “I hear it makes the liftoff speed go up 40 mph, so I’m sure it changes how the car’s going to drive and how side-drafting affects it.”
Busch suggested NASCAR needs to start summer races earlier, specifically at tracks without lights like Michigan International Speedway, to build in more time for rain delays.
“When you’re in the middle of summer and you’re at these places with no lights, you got to start earlier and try to get what you can get in for the fans that are there,” Busch said. “(They) give up their time and their money and their weekends to make it there, to make your show look better on TV with butts in the seats.
“You owe it to those people.”
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