By: Ashley McCubbin

Kyle Busch was having a stellar start to the NASCAR season, scoring back-to-back podium finishes at Auto Club Speedway and Phoenix Raceway. Then the COVID-19 pandemic swept over the world, resulting in the drivers sitting on the sidelines for 70 days.

With the series returning to action at Darlington Raceway, many believed that the momentum would continue for Joe Gibbs Racing. Instead, it was one of those races to forget for Busch.

Right from when the weekend began, things got off to the wrong foot with his No. 18 M&M’s Toyota Camry failing pre-race technical inspection twice. As a result, he had to start from the tail of the field rather than fourth.

It’d make for a challenging The Real Heroes 400, ultimately resulting in a 26th-place finish.

“Really disappointing to have to start at the back when we had a fourth-place starting position,” he admitted post-race. “That was going to be a great day for us to just kind of be up front, ride up and front and hopefully stay up front all day and make our M&M’s Camry better after being in position from the start up where we feel we should be running.”

There was some good signs out of Busch, as he was able to eventually work his way into the top-five. The uphill climb through the field for Busch was tougher than some could have envisioned, though, as he spent much of the event just outside of the top-10. But a combination of finding the handling and fast pit crew service enabled him to break into the top-five in the final 70 laps.

Ultimately, Busch was unable to capitalize, falling back to ninth due to the car being “so slow on the restarts” as a result of a loose condition.

“Then (I) got in the wall and had to go back to the back and worked our way back up to the front again,” he continued. “Then got back to fifth again for the final restart and had a loose wheel. My guys had a good pit stop, but obviously too good of a pit stop where we didn’t get all the lugnuts tight and it was a loose wheel. Ended up having to come down pit road and service the car again to make it to the end. Just got no result for the effort that was put out today.”

Busch will now focus towards Wednesday night in getting redemption for the struggles they suffered. However, there will be challenges once again as his 26th-place finish on Sunday means he will start there on Wednesday. Though also, the lack of practice seems to be hindering the team right now.

“We’ve got problems unloading off the hauler and being good,” Busch admitted. “It takes a lot of work between Adam (Stevens, crew chief) and myself and the engineers to get the car tuned in and dialed into the race tracks. We fought the same thing last year at Indy, which we ran terrible last year at Indy with no practice in the race and we had won the previous three years. It’s something we definitely have to work on.”

Despite everything being chaotic on track, Busch praised NASCAR for the policies put in place, stating it went really smoothly.

“Just being able to walk around the track from your bus to the car and just be there to do a job and a duty and less chaos kind of going around the day seemed to make it a bit easier,” he commented. “Other than that, you kind of miss just being with or around your guys.”