With three wins in 26 races, Kyle Busch feels he’s off to a good start as he enters the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs as the fifth seed.
But the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing driver still isn’t content with the stats he’s earned in his column this season.
“I’d love to have five (wins) total, in a perfect world, so let’s win two of these final 10 races and we’ll really have something to talk about,” Busch said. “You can always bank yourself as being a championship guy if you have five wins.”
The 38-year-old isn’t wrong, either.
Chase Elliott logged five victories during his 2020 championship season, while Jimmie Johnson triumphed five times en route to claiming his seventh and final title in 2016.
During both of Busch’s successful title runs — 2015, ’19 — he had five wins.
But this year has seen marked change for Busch, who departed Joe Gibbs Racing, his Cup Series home of 15 years, over the offseason and signed with Richard Childress Racing — a team that hasn’t won a championship since Dale Earnhardt in 1994.
The new set of circumstances didn’t intimidate Busch.
“I don’t care what team I’m at, I’m going to go try to win a championship,” Busch said. “But to have the history and the legacy of RCR and everything that they’ve done over the years with (Dale) Earnhardt Sr., and with the other drivers that have been there — yeah, it’s been a little quiet lately, but that would be nice to shake that up.”
The two-time Cup Series champion is assured that RCR has the potential to make the Final Four, as long as his team can limit its mistakes.
“Not making mistakes…that’s where I feel like our detriment has been. And some of it isn’t self-induced, you know. Like the engine issues at the Indy Road Course — how do you know that’s going to happen?” Busch said.
His 36th-place finish in Indianapolis was one of his worst of the season, though he has five other DNFs that stick out like a sore thumb on his otherwise solid résumé.
With two wins, 14 top-10 finishes and an average finish of 14.1 highlighting his ongoing season, the No. 8 Chevrolet driver feels the team has proved their capabilities and performed up to expectation.
While neither RCR or Busch advanced past the round of 16 last year, the Las Vegas native believes that there could be an advantage to their mutual discontent with coming up short.
“I feel like they (RCR) have a good sense of what it takes and what it’s like. We both got knocked out early, but there’s learning from that,” Busch said. “I mean anytime you have experience doing something, you’re only going to think back to the moments that you can be better at it and not make the same mistakes over and over again.”