Kyle Busch, who is winless through the opening 22 races of the 2024 season, will roll from the 12th position on the starting grid in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Cook Out 400 at Richmond Raceway as he tries to extend his consecutive seasons with a NASCAR Cup Series win streak to 20 years.
However, Busch, who has had a very tumultuous season by his standards, noticeably had his wrist wrapped as he entered his post-qualifying media availability at Richmond Raceway on Saturday. According to the Richard Childress Racing driver, he sustained an injury to his left wrist in a crash on Lap 158 in the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Here is a video of Busch’s crash from Indianapolis:
Kyle Busch CRASHES to force the #Brickyard400 into OVERTIME.
? : NBC pic.twitter.com/E9Zr4nxSQe
— NASCAR on NBC (@NASCARonNBC) July 21, 2024
“Sprained it,” Busch said of his wrapped wrist.
Busch continued by explaining, “These great NextGen race cars, snap your wheel, and you snap your wrist.”
Then, Busch made a pretty eye-opening admission. The 39-year-old two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion feels the injury to his wrist was severe enough that had it not been for the two-week Olympic break, he would have had to miss at least a race.
.@KyleBusch did sprain his wrist in his Indy crash.
Take a look at his wrist here, he says without the time off he wouldn’t be racing. #NASCAR pic.twitter.com/egHCDxPsTu
— Peter Stratta (@peterstratta) August 10, 2024
“Without two weeks off, I would not have been able to race,” Busch stated. “I’m good. I’m pretty good, now.”
While questions continued to be fired out by the media at Richmond Raceway about whether he had sustained any broken bones or if he would need any surgery to correct the injury, Busch started getting a bit standoffish and was ready to move on to other topics.
“No. Are you guys violating HIPAA,” Busch questioned before telling the reporters that he was ready to move on to the next topic.
The subject moved to his Richard Childress Racing No. 8 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, and while that has been a bit of a sore subject for the majority of the season, Busch, and the RCR team as a whole, unloaded with speed at the 0.750-mile short track on Saturday. Which has Busch feeling a bit optimistic about his weekend.
“Yeah, we unloaded here and felt good balance and decent speed,” Busch explained. “Definitely a balance difference between the two sets of tires. That was probably our biggest thing. That was our biggest struggle. If we can just close that gap up, I felt pretty good on the controls. [My teammate] Austin [Dillon] laid down a really good lap to make the top-10 there, so I thought I could have run at least what Denny ran if I would have hit my line and everything perfect, but I messed up just a little bit and I didn’t quite get there.”
While Busch narrowly missed out on the final round of qualifying on Saturday, he will start from the 12th position in Sunday’s Cook Out 400, which is his best starting position since a seventh-place qualifying effort at Iowa Speedway back in June.
This weekend, NASCAR is allowing the teams to utilize two different tire compounds. The Prime (yellow-lettered) Goodyear tires will feature the typical harder tire compound and the Option (red-lettered) Goodyear tires will have a slightly softer compound.
Busch says he prefers the Option tires and wishes Goodyear would swap to that compound permanently.
“That should be our primary, and go more than that. The ones we’re on are hockey pucks,” Busch jabbed.
The tire compounds are a balancing act. The Option tires are faster, but are built to not be able to run as long without giving up, whereas the Prime tires are slower overall, but will make it comfortably to the end of a fuel load without wearing out.
Busch feels the Option tires will have no issue lasting like the Primes, and he feels that if teams were given more time and more sets of Options to tinker with through the weekend, that they would become the focus of crew chiefs setting their cars up, and the teams would be able to get the maximum result from the softer tires.
“They’ll last the whole time, it’s just a matter of pace, right? They fall off,” Busch said of the Option tires. “They actually feel more like traditional Richmond, where you would get tighter center and slow down center. But if we had more time to work on them and make them better, then you would. But you only have two sets of those. You’ve got to run the majority of your race on the yellows, so you’ve got to focus on those.”
Will the multiple tire compounds end up being a factor in Sunday’s race? Only time will tell, but teams will have to weigh out when to utilize the softer tires as they only have two sets of the Option tires in their arsenal as opposed to six sets of the harder Prime tires.
