Kyle Busch was certainly affected by the way his exit from Joe Gibbs Racing came about in the 2022 season.
Changing a team is always a hard process. Especially for someone who had spent 15 years with the same team, the change can have a bigger impact. And Busch is currently going through that process.
Having won 2 championships and 60 Cup races, Busch is one of the most successful drivers in NASCAR. Yet he might feel that he will have something to prove to his former employer as he begins a new chapter with Richard Childress Racing.
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With some time before the next season begins, right now is the time for some reflection on how the past one went. And as for Busch, it didn’t go as well he as he would have liked. He started the season in a good way but the results started turning bad as it progressed. Speaking on his performance, Busch said:
“I would say that the beginning of the year we actually started out fairly well. We had some decent runs. We sat on the pole and finished second at the Clash. We finished sixth at Daytona. We had a fast car at California, but we were overheating. We had to pull some of the radiator ductwork screen protector stuff out. We had top-five lap times throughout the second half of the race, but it just didn’t work out. We were going to win Vegas, leading laps there, racing with a teammate. The list can go on.
“We were really good the first half of the year, then it was right around Nashville where we were running second and we should have stayed out on the final caution but didn’t. We pitted. We ran 22nd. After that, it seemed like we fell off the rails. Nothing we tried, nothing we did could ever really materialize.”
Also, it is fair to notice that Busch was going through a lot of uncertainty for much of the season as his future with JGR was up in the air. The two-time champion added that this uncertainty definitely affected his performance in the second half of the season.
“That was around the same time of the year that it was known that I was most likely not going to return to the 18 car. I feel like there was definitely a bit of a downturn in competition and stuff like that. It’s hard to prove, obviously, but it felt like things didn’t really feel the same after that. We kind of went the rest of the year struggling to find our way. Felt like a boat in water with no propellers. Couldn’t go anywhere. Even when we did have decent runs and had opportunities to run up front or score a win – we blew up at Darlington while leading, we blew up at Bristol while running top five. That pretty much eliminated us from contention for the remainder of the year.”
While the 2022 season was not a very characteristic Busch performance, he is expecting to hit the ground running with RCR right from the beginning.