Gotta love his honestly.
Kyle Busch is gearing up for another NASCAR Cup Series season with Richard Childress Racing, but going into 2026 he’s opening up on where his team needs to get better in order to be a regular contender.
The 40-year-old Busch is a two time NASCAR Cup Series champion, but the past two seasons have been a struggle for Busch and his #8 team.
Busch moved to RCR back in 2023 after 15 seasons at Joe Gibbs Racing, and initially it seemed like things were going to work out well for both sides with three wins in the first 15 races. But since then, things have gone south for RCR as a whole: Busch ended up finishing the 2023 season 14th in the points after getting bounced in the first round of the playoffs, before missing the postseason entirely and finishing 20th and 21st in points the past two seasons.
Of course things aren’t going much better for his teammate Austin Dillon, though he did manage to make the playoffs in 2025 with a win at Richmond before being eliminated in the first round and finishing the season 15th – next to last in the playoff standings.
It seems like Busch (and RCR in general) is having trouble finding speed in their cars, which seems to force Busch to try to overdrive the car to make up for the lack of speed. The result is that Busch finds himself caught up in an unusually high number of incidents that end up relegating him to poor finishes, putting him even further behind in points and putting even more pressure on him to get the most – or more – out of his car.
Well ahead of the 2026 season, Busch spoke with SiriusXM about some of the issues facing RCR, and he didn’t hold back in criticizing his team for their lack of speed, particularly during qualifying:
“That’s probably our number one holdback with RCR, is just that we don’t tend to qualify good and hold on to the first stage points. That’s where we really get hurt throughout the season, is just our stage points and how much we have there, so we’ve got to get better on all that. So we’ll see.”
Their qualifying struggles seem to especially concern Busch given the change this season to the playoff format, with a return to the 10-race Chase and the elimination of the “win and you’re in format.” And in typical Kyle Busch fashion, he was brutally honest in his feelings about the new playoff format:
“I thought we got away from it for a reason in the past, so I’m not real sure why we went back to it. The reason why we sort of went away from it was obviously Jimmie Johnson’s dominance…
With the racing, the way that it is today and everybody running over everybody all the time, you might see everybody that all 16 of us have a, have a bad race. So, you know, if all of us have a bad race, then that could just sort of be construed as your throwaway and you got to be good in the other nine, but you know, who’s to say, we don’t know.
We’ll see how it plays out, but obviously everybody’s going to look towards the regular season and maximizing all the stage points, things like that, points racing basically. And you know, that lends itself to having to qualify good on Saturdays in order to be up there up front, holding on to your track position for the first stage, getting that first stage point.”
There’s been a lot of talk about Busch’s future with RCR, and in NASCAR in general, since his current slump. His contract expires after the 2026 season, and there are several rides possibly opening up after this year depending on how their current drivers perform. If a guy like Alex Bowman has a bad season and parts ways with Hendrick Motorsports, there’s no doubt that Busch would be an attractive candidate for the #48 car. Or if Tyler Reddick ends up leaving 23XI Racing after this season, Kyle could end up in the #45 car that was formerly driven by his brother, Kurt Busch.
All that speculation could be put to rest, however, with a strong performance from Kyle and the #8 team this season. And according to him, it’s all going to come down to qualifying.
