NASCAR Cup Series will have new champion after Kyle Busch eliminated from playoffs

What remains of the NASCAR Cup season is going to be largely academic for Kyle Busch.

Busch, the 2019 Cup champion, was eliminated from contention for this season’s title after a 30th-place finish at Sunday’s Bank of America Roval 400 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, the final race of the Round of 12 of the playoffs. Busch came into the race ninth in the standings and needed to either win or earn enough points to advance to the Round of 8, which begins next week at Kansas.

He did neither, after a strategic gamble failed to let him maintain the lead coming out of a late-race caution.

Busch is the first defending Cup champion to be eliminated this early in the playoffs. He also hasn’t won a race yet in 2020 and now has four chances remaining to avoid going winless for the first time in his 16 seasons as a full-time Cup driver. He has four second-place finishes at Fontana, Darlington, Atlanta and Bristol.

There were moments late in the race Sunday when it appeared Busch might be able to pull it off, especially when crew chief Adam Stevens elected to keep Busch on the track rather than pit during a caution with 21 laps left. That allowed Busch to take the lead on the restart, but, driving with old tires underneath his No. 18 Toyota, Busch surrendered the lead two laps later to Erik Jones.

“We were trying something, anything,” Busch said. “But I didn’t have anything to drive away. I didn’t have anything for nobody.”

Busch entered the 16-driver playoffs as the the 14th seed after crashing at Daytona in the regular-season finale. He made it out of the first round, thanks in large part to the second-place finish at Bristol. But his inability to win this season finally caught up with him Sunday at Charlotte.

Sunday’s race didn’t start well for Busch. The left-front tire of his No. 18 Toyota went flat after he made contact with Clint Bowyer on Lap 49 (the final lap of the race’s second stage).

“Good job this year, guys,” Busch said to his crew, apparently sarcastically, on his radio as he drove to pit road to replace the tire.

Busch said there will be a complete — and ongoing — evaluation of his team at Joe Gibbs Racing.

“All those things have certainly been discussed and we’ll keep discussing them,” he said.

Busch’s goal now is to win a race, something that uncharacteristically has stayed out of his reach this season.

“It’s very important,” Busch said. “You go out there and try each and every week and, yeah, there have certainly been times where I thought, ‘Man, there’s something wrong with me and I’m not doing something right. I don’t know what I’m doing, or the car’s not quite right, or I’m not trusting what the car is really doing.’ So maybe I should just drive it harder and then I’m crashed. So I don’t know what to think.

“But certainly it would be nice to do more, and to have a win for this year would be the only consolation prize for the way this year has gone. But do we even have a shot to win? I don’t think we have a shot.”

This story was originally published October 11, 2020 at 6:33 PM.