If there ever was a NASCAR Cup race where a spoiler could rise to the top in Saturday’s night race at Bristol Motor Speedway, and steal a win away from the 16 playoff drivers, it’s Kyle Busch.
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Somehow, the words “spoiler” and “Kyle Busch” just don’t seem right together, given the Las Vegas native’s 63 career Cup wins, which are the most of any active driver in the Cup Series heading into Saturday’s race. Denny Hamlin is the next-highest active winner with 59 Cup triumphs.
What’s more, Busch is also the winningest active driver on Bristol’s high-banked 0.533-mile oval with eight wins (nine if you include one win during the three-race dirt version a few years ago). And right behind him as the winningest active driver at Bristol is Hamlin with four wins.
BUT… and capital letters practically scream out for Busch. He has arguably the greatest spoiler possibility in Saturday night’s race because of several reasons, not just because of his career wins and triumphs at Bristol:
- He is in the midst of the greatest frustration of his racing career: an 85-race winless streak, with his last win coming in June of 2023, at Gateway, ironically last week’s venue. He’s not only hungry for a win, he’s practically anorexic.
- What’s more, Busch has not won at Bristol since 2019 (technically, he won on dirt in spring 2022), and his last triumph in the annual summer night race was in 2017.
- He missed qualifying for the playoffs for the second straight season, the first time he’s ever missed the playoffs
“Bristol’s one of my favorite tracks, if not my favorite,” Busch said in this week’s Chevrolet NASCAR media release. “I love going there, it’s obviously a great place.
“It reminds me of the local short track atmosphere that you get on Saturday nights, growing up racing late models and things like that. It’s a lot of fun, I love the banking, I love the concrete and just the nature of that place.”
Can Busch bring back some of his old magic at Bristol?
But Busch also admits he’s not quite the driver he used to be there. “It’s gotten a little bit tougher over the years to be as good as I once was there. Everybody’s kind of picked up on it,” he said.
“It’s definitely one of the coolest tracks that we get a chance to go run on. And obviously, the speed that you carry there and the close nature to action, whether you run the bottom or whether you run the top, there’s just a lot of options.”
While Busch intends on being on top of his game and could impact which four drivers are eliminated after the race (and would prevent any of the four from winning at Bristol, which would advance them to the second round), there are two keys for him to put the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing back in victory lane after such a long drought:
“The biggest thing is restarts,” Busch said. “You’ve got to be ready to get down to the bottom. It seems like the bottom really fires off and takes off early. And then as the pace progresses and falls off, then you’ve got to get to the top.
“You want to be one of the first ones up to the top so that people don’t get up in front of you and block you and not allow you through traffic. It’s just really a challenging race. It’s more of a chess game a lot of times, too, rather than just trying to figure out all raw speeds.”
