Kyle Busch comes up short at Darlington, just misses playoff-clinching win

DARLINGTON, S.C. — Kyle Busch had two significant streaks at stake in Sunday’s regular-season finale at Darlington Raceway — an 11-year run of Cup Series Playoffs appearances and his remarkable stretch of 19 seasons with at least one Cup win. Busch can still keep the latter streak going in the final 10 races of the year, but the former ended in spite of his best attempts.

Busch’s late charge ended up just shy of Chase Briscoe’s stirring drive to victory in Sunday’s Cook Out Southern 500. His Richard Childress Racing No. 8 Chevrolet was just 0.361 seconds behind Briscoe’s winning No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford at the checkered flag. It was another margin of defeat from 24 races ago, however, that came to mind when NBC Sports’ Dave Burns asked about his recent brushes with what would have been a playoff-clinching win.

“And Atlanta, yeah,” Busch said, recalling his third-place finish by a slim 0.007 seconds to winner Daniel Suárez back in February. “It’s short. Come up short. Maybe I am a washed-up old dog, but hopefully I can find a few more trophies.”

Busch was mired in traffic for much of the evening, finishing out of the running for stage points at each break. But points would be of no measurable help in his playoff bid; Busch entered 106 below the provisional elimination line, and only a victory could vault him into the 16-driver field.

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Busch made a legitimate run at it, with a late pit stop providing him with Goodyear tires that were nine laps fresher than Briscoe’s for the run to the finish. Busch said that he needed Briscoe’s tires to be roughly three laps older for his No. 8 Chevy to have a better chance to contend.

“We put ourselves in this position, and through much of that race, didn’t think we had a shot to get ourselves a win and punch our way through,” Busch said, “but tires there at the end, and having an opportunity also just put wind in our sails. But then once I got in the wind of the 14 car, I couldn’t do anything with it. You know, just lost too much grip and the wake on these things … he wasn’t blocking or anything, I just lost grip. That was all I had.”

Busch has been buoyed by his recent performance, which has helped soothe some of the doldrums from his summertime stretch of five DNFs in a seven-race span that created his must-win scenario. He finished the regular season with three consecutive top-five finishes, including his current two-race streak of runner-up days that have been laced with heartache.

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The two-time champion and 63-time winner hasn’t experienced a winless skid this long in his Cup Series career, and the frustration level has risen.

“A lot of people are stat people. I’ve gone back and looked at the stats and the amount of second- and third-place finishes I have in this Next Gen car is disgusting,” said Busch, who has finished second or third on seven occasions since his last win (June 4, 2023, Gateway), “and it’s really, really getting old, and it really, really sucks that I can’t come out on top and get myself some more trophies and some more checkered flags for my team and Team Chevy and all of our sponsors and everybody that supports us and gets us here and give Rowdy Nation something to really cheer about on Monday.”

Busch has missed the Cup Series Playoffs just three times — as a rookie in 2005, then again in 2009 and 2012 — but never before in the elimination-style format introduced in 2014. The goals the rest of the way, he says, are simple — win, and potentially cause a playoff disruption in the process.

“I mean, that’s going to be our thing. If we can chase some checkered flags, we might piss some people off in the mayhem of getting those,” Busch said. “They don’t like it when you get guys on the outside winning races much, especially when you got to race them hard or door them a little bit and it ruins their points day, so I’m sure we’ll hear some stories about that. Little foreshadowing for you.”