I felt coming into the Round of 12 like this round could be where Kyle Busch shined.

For Texas, Busch had five Top-10 finishes in his last six Texas starts entering this past weekend. He won in 2020 even. The car he’s driving now, won a year ago. Out of 32 career starts on this 1.5-mile track, Busch had four wins, 14 Top-5 finishes and 18 Top-10 results. He’s also finished seventh, sixth, first, 11th and seventh on intermediate tracks lately as well.

He qualified 7th and had a strong car early running as high as third. But, on Lap 60, he reported that he felt like his right front tire was flat. The team felt like maybe when he got off the racing line it put some marbles on his tires and that he should ride it out until the end of the stage. He dropped 5 spots to 8th before losing control in Turn 2 and backing into the wall which left him 34th in the end.

Busch dropped to the bottom of the playoff standings, -17 heading to Talladega this weekend.

“The car had good grip in it. We had those couple of yellows back-to-back and we restarted on the outside,” said Busch. “I felt like I had a flat right front and I was going to come to pit road. I second-guessed it and said ‘I don’t think so, man. It’s just something is wrong… something isn’t right, but it’s not a flat.’ And just all on its own, just turned into the bottom of the race track in turn one and it just swapped ends on me. That’s the rear, not the front, not having grip… so I just don’t know.”

Luckily, his championship aspirations are not all lost. He has 2 more shots to get into the third round and while most wouldn’t be confident heading into these next two wildcard tracks, Busch should be.

He won at Talladega in the spring. Granted he said he needed luck to do so, but if you look at superspeedway’s across the board, he’s done well on them this season. He’s scored the third most points (160) on them.

“Talladega is a stress-ball of emotions,” said Busch, a three-time winner in his first season driving the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet who goes into the weekend’s race ranked last (12th) in the Playoff standings after a DNF at Texas Motor Speedway on Sunday.

Then it’s to the ROVAL where he was third a year ago, fourth the year prior and had three Top-5 finishes in as many races to start the road racing season off with including a pair of runner-ups. He was 36th at Indy but was in the top five before an issue. This car was runner-up in 2021.

Maybe he’ll be okay after all. He’s hopeful to avoid another early exit that’s seen him bounced from the playoffs in the first or second round for three straight years now. He had five straight Championship 4 appearances prior though.

While he has just 1 top 5 finish in the last 11 weeks, he had 4 in a 5 race span prior to that including a win and a runner-up finish too.

“I think you come in here stress-meter pegged, regardless if whether you’re 30 (points) to the good or 30 behind,’’ Busch said. “We obviously know in our situation we’re further behind. So you have to race. I think it’s been more sought out to just race these races and run normal and not to hang out in the back and try to wait for something to happen. Because with these cars and the way the race play out it’s so hard to make moves and make passes and get track position whenever you want it. You can’t.

“So you have to hold it when you got it and if you don’t have it, then you have to figure out how to fuel save so that you can short-pit guys and jump ‘em on pit road. There’s so many variables you have to just race it out and don’t worry about it. Whatever happens, happens.’’