Kyle Busch Faces Harsh Reality as Performance Slump Hits New Low at Watkins Glen originally appeared on Athlon Sports.
Kyle Busch would be the first one to admit that his performance has dropped off in recent years. The numbers don’t lie.
One of the more notable statistics regularly discussed is the two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion’s race winless streak, which currently stands at 80 races. Last year snapped Busch’s streak of 19 consecutive years of winning at least one race a season. His last win came at Gateway in June 2023.
Some might suggest the 40-year-old driver’s drop-off is a result of the Gen 7 car. Others might say it’s due to moving from Joe Gibbs Racing to Richard Childress Racing. But those theories don’t hold up when you consider Busch earned three wins in 2023 in the Gen 7 car racing for RCR.
Rowdy Nation knows this decline hasn’t just been in NASCAR’s top series. In the Xfinity and Truck Series, where Busch is the all-time wins leader in both, his success has experienced a similar downturn in recent years.
In 2021, his final season with Joe Gibbs Racing, he won all five of his Xfinity starts. He won two out of his five races in the Trucks running for his own KBM team. He finished runner-up in the other three.
In 2022, he didn’t run any Xfinity races. He competed five times in the Trucks that year, winning once and finishing inside the top three three times and seventh in the other.
In 2023 with Kaulig Racing, Busch returned to Xfinity racing but his winning ways didn’t come with him. He ran four times and had three top 10s, one of which was a top five, but no wins. That was the first time since 2012 he went winless in a season. However, in the Trucks and the final year of KBM, he won twice and earned a pair of runner-up results and a seventh place.
On Friday @KyleBusch finished last in the @NASCAR_Trucks race. It’s the second time he’s finished last in his last six Truck races. This season the future Hall of Famer hit a new low mark in the trucks, failing to earn three top fives in a season for the first time since 2004… pic.twitter.com/jQSHtogI6g
— Kyle Dalton (@kdsportswriter) August 10, 2025
Last season, he raced just once in the Xfinity with RCR, where he finished sixth at Charlotte. With Spire Motorsports taking over KBM in the Trucks, once again he made a couple of trips to Victory Lane at Atlanta and Texas and had a runner-up result at Bristol. The other two finishes were outside of the top 15, including his first-ever last-place finish at Darlington.
Which brings us to this season. He hasn’t made any Xfinity Series starts. However, in his five Trucks appearances, he started with a win at Atlanta but since then has managed a single top five, two top 10s and two results of 15th or worse, including his second career last-place result, which came on Saturday at Watkins Glen when he had a steering issue and was out in the first 10 laps.
With that result, it was his third finish outside the top five this year and the first time since 2004 (when he raced once) that he’s had fewer than three top fives in a season.
In other words, Busch’s decline in the Cup Series isn’t as surprising when you consider he’s seen a similar drop-off in success in the other series as well.
Related: Kyle Busch Fires Back After Shane van Gisbergen Calls Him ‘Old and Scared’
This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Aug 10, 2025, where it first appeared.
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