“I Was Jealous”: Kyle Busch on the Difference Between His Time With Joe Gibbs and Richard Childress

It’s really hard to swallow even the idea that someone like Kyle Busch, who has two Cup championships to his credit, once believed that he wasn’t good enough. But it is true. Today, Busch is one of the biggest names in NASCAR but there was a time when he was frustrated at not being able to win as frequently as his then-teammates did.

In an interview with former Stewart-Haas Racing driver Kevin Harvick, the RCR driver was asked how his tenure at Joe Gibbs Racing was different from how things are at Richard Childress Racing now. Rowdy went back in time when he used to drive for Hendrick Motorsports in the Xfinity rumble and then replaced Terry Labonte in the Cup Series in 2005, where he admitted that he was unable to match the number of wins as his then-teammates, Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson.

“Both organizations are obviously different. They have their different ways and their different tendencies of things and what they do,” he said. “When I joined JGR, I was off of three years of being with Hendrick so…seeing Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson and the success that they were having, I was jealous. I was only winning once or twice a year; they were winning six to ten times a year, and it was like, what am I doing wrong? Why can’t I be like those guys right now in my first three years of Cup racing?”

Therefore, Busch took his time floating around at JGR, listening to stuff, learning, and experimenting with the different ways that he could get to the front of the pack and win races. And that has paid off for sure.

Kyle Busch is more confident in himself today, thanks to his stint at JGR

Being in the sport for almost two decades, Busch feels like he finally has a holistic view of what should be done to win races as a team. And that has come not just from being a driver, but from being a team owner as well. “I feel like I have a good sense of direction of what needs to happen, what should take place, how things could be structured and organized and all of that… also from owning a race team,” he explained. “There’s a lot of that happening behind the scenes.” However, he still wants to be the same competitive driver on the track who just wants to win races.

Harvick was curious why Busch thought that the #8 RCR team cooled off at the latter half of the season despite winning three races at Fontana, Talladega, and Gateway last year. Busch wasn’t ready to believe that it was anything on the team’s part.

“I think a little bit was just… the rest of the teams kind of caught up,” said Busch. “There were some things that we were doing behind the scenes that NASCAR got on to, we kind of lost in that and we didn’t find any other advantages that we could re-step up.” But that doesn’t mean they did not run well at all. Busch’s performances at Texas Motor Speedway and Michigan were quite remarkable, but both of them were short-lived due to crashes right in Stage 1. For the Toyota driver, those were merely “dumb stuff.”