1,000 Greatest Drivers: Kyle Busch

His best years may be behind him, but he's certainly still relevant.

I doubt I’ll be having to update this too many more times because it is obvious that most of Busch’s best years are behind him. While I’m sure he’s not done winning yet especially considering how many near-misses he had in a year where his cars were rather slow, I’ll be shocked if he ever wins a championship or is even a top five driver in a season again after this. I already wrote in that he “had his first winless season in 2024”. I suppose there’s a chance that that won’t be true, but he and Richard Childress Racing have not had much speed on short tracks and one mile ovals (which I refuse to call short tracks because when I first started watching in the ‘90s, short tracks were only tracks < 1 mile in length but the media have suddenly retconned this and I don’t know when or why that happened). Regardless, I don’t think his performance this year has been all that bad and the main reasons he missed the playoffs were slow cars and a lot of sloppy crashes. He still looks like he’s going to have a pretty solid rating in my teammate model this year and he factored in a good number of races. He actually has 13 natural races led this year, which is tied for third-most in the Cup Series, so he’s not done yet. And I do have to give him credit for not wrecking Harrison Burton to win at Daytona. We know his teammate would have no qualms about that…