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Kyle Busch entered the second round of the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs not knowing if he would advance to the third round.
It’s not that he doesn’t have confidence in his abilities. It’s just that his season had been so up and down.
“Realistically, I have no clue,” Busch said the day before the Round of 12 opened at Texas Motor Speedway.
He later said something a little bit prophetic: “I would like to think that normal races, normal circumstances, we can make it through this round.”
The next day, the round opened with abnormal circumstances, sending the two-time Cup champion into last place among the playoff drivers.
A crash Sunday on Lap 73 — the second consecutive year he has crashed at Texas — was a strange occurrence. Busch felt something was not right with his right front tire but also was able to turn lap speeds as fast as the leaders. He just needed to nurse the car another six laps or so to get to the end of the stage and he could pit under caution.
He never got there and now sits 17 points below the current playoff cutoff with two typically more unpredictable races — Talladega Superspeedway and the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course — remaining in the round.
Was it the beginning of the end of the playoff run for a driver considered one of the most talented on the circuit? Busch won Cup titles in 2015 and 2019 and now appears on the brink of being eliminated in the first or second round for the third time in the past four years
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“This is the time of the year to perform and put up results, and I’m a complete letdown to my team right now not being able to get the results that we need,” Busch said. “Every time I try, I crash. It’s like the less I try, the more I ride around, the better day we have.”
Busch said he didn’t know Sunday what to do as his team encouraged him to stay on the track unless he really felt he needed to pit. A driver hates to crash out but track position is so important that a driver more than likely will hope that they can at least find a way to make it to a caution flag — without being the reason for the caution flag.
“We came off the pit road with new tires after the green-flag cycle and everything was really good — and then we had those couple of restarts. I restarted on the top on that last one, and I felt like I had a flat right front,” Busch said.
“I was going to come pit and I second-guessed it because I was like, ‘Man, you know what, it just doesn’t feel like a flat right front.’ Like just debris was on it, but it was shaking and vibrating. I just went back to the bottom of the racetrack to mind my own business on the bottom, and then it just swapped ends with the back of the car.”
