Kyle Busch focuses forward in a challenging season

Mired in the longest winless streak of his Cup career, Kyle Busch says that recovering from his injuries in a 2015 crash at Daytona “was easy compared to this.”

Busch goes into the final two races of the regular season — Saturday at Daytona (7:30 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock) and Sept. 1 at Darlington — needing a win to make the playoffs. The two-time Cup champion has not missed the playoffs since 2012.

Also at stake is his NASCAR-record streak of 19 consecutive seasons with at least one Cup

Asked about the challenges he’s gone through, Busch acknowledged his Xfinity crash in February 2015 at Daytona that gave him a compound fracture of his lower right leg and a mid-foot fracture to his left foot. Busch missed the first 11 Cup races that season but went on to win the first of his two series titles that season.

“The injury was easy compared to this,” Busch said in response to a question from NBC Sports. “That was nothing. I’ll take that all day long if it means that same thing afterwards.”

Then he turned to his recent struggles.

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“It’s tough,” he said. “When you have done as well as you’ve done and the success and the accolades and everything that you have and you get ran over and beat down, all that sort of stuff, it’s hard to get yourself back up again to go back out there.

“I’ve been down before, although probably never as long or as low as this has been, but there’s a lot of great people that are around me. Everybody on the 8 team has really put their arm around me and patted me on the back, like ‘We got you man.’

“We know we’re not doing the best right now, so we’re all trying to strive to get better and put ourselves in the spots that we all want to be in. It’s not due to a lack of effort. I know that. There’s plenty of hard work going around. It’s just a matter of being a little bit better at it, being a little bit smarter at it and trying to make the most of it.”

Busch is coming off a fourth-place finish at Michigan on Monday — his first top-five finish since April.