BROOKLYN, Mich. –– Kyle Busch has returned to form.
For the first time in what seemed like ages, Busch found himself as a regular contender at the front of the NASCAR Cup Series field at Michigan International Speedway.
With qualifying rained out on Saturday (Aug. 17), the metric NASCAR used placed Busch as the 13th-place starter. He was able to work his way up to a sixth-place finish in stage one on Sunday (Aug. 18) before the skies opened up again and forced NASCAR to hold the final 149 laps on Monday (Aug. 19).
“You gotta be on top of your game,” Busch said of the wait. “You gotta be ready to go at any moment’s notice if they call you to go. … Being around for so long, you know, it doesn’t really deter me much.
“It gets you hopeful that it deters somebody else and you can excel on that.”
When the race went back green on Monday, Busch was one of the fastest drivers out of the gate. He took the lead from Chase Elliott and was able to hold onto it for several laps before Martin Truex Jr. surged to the front. All in all, Busch led three times for 24 laps, just the third-highest number of laps he’s led in a race this season.
Busch was even able to come away with the stage two win after wrestling it away from Ross Chastain on a restart. The stage ended under caution after a big crash with just under five laps to go left no time to restart before the stage’s conclusion.
Sensing that the No. 8 could potentially sneak away from the Irish Hills with a win or top five, Busch’s crew chief Randall Burnett dialed up some savvy pit strategy under the final green flag pit stop. When Busch came to pit road on lap 167, Burnett gave Busch just two fresh tires instead of four, to allow him to maintain track position and leapfrog the leaders.
“We knew we had to get outside our box,” Burnett told Frontstretch after the race. “We weren’t gonna be able to outrun a couple of those cars straight up, because a couple of them had a little bit better speed than us. So we had to figure out a way to try to put ourselves in position to be in front of them.
“We had fresher lefts and we didn’t need as much fuel. So we only needed two tires at that point. So that was to jump in front of [the leaders] and make them pass us instead of us trying to figure out how to pass them.”
The call worked as good as it was able to, as Busch was able to exit pit road and blend back on to the racetrack well ahead of William Byron and Tyler Reddick, who were leading when the pit cycle began and were going to be the leaders once the cycle concluded.
“Randall and the guys made some really good pit calls there to keep us our track position and get us up front where we needed to be,” Busch said. “Cycled back forward where we needed to be and we fought in the top 10 all day.”
While Reddick was able to pass Busch for the eventual race lead, Busch continued to battle in the top five before a caution for Truex came out with six laps to go. Busch held serve through the ensuing restart (as well as a second overtime restart after a Chastain spin) to finish fourth.
The finish is Busch’s first top 10 since the Chicago street course in July, when he finished ninth. To find his last top five, you have to go all the way back to Dover International Speedway in April, when he also finished fourth.
Busch has had an uncharacteristic season from hell for one reason or another. From wrong-place-wrong-time crashes to mechanical issues to just plain bad luck, the Richard Childress Racing team has not really found any sort of consistent momentum this season. In turn, Busch’s average finish is just 18.7 thanks to poor results.
After a particularly bad spell of luck over the summer that included spraining his wrist at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a fourth-place finish (and really a finish in general) is just what the doctor ordered.
“That’s definitely good as well, too,” Busch said with a chuckle. “These are our stronger-suited racetracks though.”
“It give us some momentum for sure,” Burnett added. “We still need to make our cars a little better, obviously. We didn’t have quite the speed that we needed to hold off the [Nos.] 24 or 45 there at the end.
“We were probably a sixth-, seventh-, eighth-place car. You know what I mean? … Just tried to do whatever we could to put ourselves in position to be at the front at the end of it.”
Busch now turns his attention to Daytona International Speedway on Saturday (Aug. 24), where he led 12 laps in February at the Daytona 500 en route to a 12th-place finish.
“I think we can just kind of take the overall day and the chemistry and the result and try to move forward with it and better it,” Busch said. “The two [racetracks coming up] are entirely different than this one. So not much on vehicle dynamics and setups and things like that, but just good momentum heading in the right direction.”
Anthony Damcott joined Frontstretch in March 2022. Currently, he is an editor and co-authors Fire on Fridays (Fridays); he is also the primary Truck Series reporter/writer and serves as an at-track reporter, among many other duties he takes on for the site. A proud West Virginia Wesleyan College alum from Akron, Ohio, Anthony is now a grad student. He is a theatre actor and fight-choreographer-in-training in his free time.
You can keep up with Anthony by following @AnthonyDamcott on X.