Kyle Busch Stays Tight-Lipped on NASCAR Busting Richard Childress’ Unfair Setup

In NASCAR, the difference between winning and blending into the pack can, at times, rely on how well a team exploits the “gray areas”. And when Kyle Busch joined Richard Childress Racing in 2023, that edge was waiting to be exploited, leading Busch to three wins in the first 15 races. However, just as quickly, it vanished.

In stark contrast, Busch has now gone 102 races without a Cup Series win. The turning point, as he recently shared, came when NASCAR issued a warning about “some of the stuff that we were doing to the race car”. However, he stopped short of giving any details beyond that – leaving many, like Steven Taranto, wondering whether the gray tilted towards black or white.

Once Taranto got a hold of Busch, he didn’t waste a second, urging him with a simple, “Can you talk about it?” However, Busch’s response was just as vague as his previous one.

“I think that, you know, those—I think we had 2 or 3, and they were those pretty good-sized clippets that would give you a nice little advantage. Now with those three gone—let’s just say that makes up 75 points and you need 100—well, now we’ve got to go to work on the onesies and twosies to get all the way back to 100.

“So you literally need 100 details each and every week that go into these cars that are the fine, little minute things that make up a difference in which you’ll see performance on the racetrack,” Busch said.

In 2022, NASCAR debuted the Next Gen car. A new design that was set to usher in a new era of racing. In fact, RCR was involved in developing the first prototype and also collaborated with Chevy as they worked on their unique body shapes. The extensive testing and time spent in the development of the car gave RCR a significant boost in the 2022 season – something that pushed Busch to join the team in 2023.

The warning then came right after he secured his victory of the season at Worldwide Technology Raceway. Busch explained to Sean Hannity, “and they said, ‘Hey, don’t bring that back.’…It wasn’t anything like against the rules, but you always exploit the gray area. So we exploited a gray area, and we found something, and we had an advantage.”

NASCAR never released an official statement or a press release about this, keeping the specifics private. But this type of intervention is not uncommon. NASCAR has a long history of stepping in when teams start pushing the limits of what’s acceptable in the rulebook.

A famous example would be Chad Knaus during his time atop the pit box for Jimmie Johnson. The pair was known for pushing boundaries in the pursuit of an edge, often drawing accusations of ‘cheating’. Knaus was, in fact, penalized at least thrice by NASCAR. Even so, that did little to derail Johnson’s dominance on the track – a chapter that has been omitted from Busch’s story.

That said, in his case, it might’ve been more than a gray area. For some reason, the Chevys were heavily penalized in 2023.

Chevy’s mysterious success formula that annoyed NASCAR

Hendrick Motorsports was rebuked in March for using illegal hood louvers that supplied air to the radiators. NASCAR judged that the teams had illegally modified a part that deals with how the radiator duct is assembled. All four teams lost 100 owner points and 10 playoff points, with the four crew chiefs being fined $100,000 and suspended for the next four Cup Series races.

Similarly, Richard Childress Racing and the No. 3 team were penalized $75,000 at Martinsville for their illegal underwing assembly and hardware. So something was definitely going on back at the Chevy camp. Also, per the hints in Busch’s comments, the warning might have been something related to downforce – which has led to several theories around aero + ride-height-related loophole in the next-gen car.

Since RCR was fined for messing around with the underwing assembly, they might have found a way to make the cars significantly better and were trying to apply the same to all their charters. And we need to keep in mind that it was only the second year that NASCAR was running the Next-Gen car.

Back then, even a little advantage could have gone a long way. GM has the biggest NASCAR program out of three manufacturers, so data from all teams could’ve led them to a loophole yet to be discovered by others. For now, though, Richard Childress Racing is relying on Dillon’s team for better data. Dillon has been the only winner on the team for the past two years.

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