A new season brings new hope. Kyle Busch is banking on all the optimism he can harness to turn the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season into a promising one. His team has made massive efforts in that direction. Richard Childress Racing shook up its internal personnel, roping in veterans Keith Rodden, Richard Boswell, and others as the team’s top executives. The team also landed big sponsors like Rebel Bourbon.

However, the depressing stats from last year still haunt the No. 8 Chevrolet team. Those numbers reflect not only a streak of rotten luck but also a dwindling legacy. NASCAR insider Doug Rice implied the same.

Is the end of the road visible for Kyle Busch?

After all, Rowdy has been around for a long time in NASCAR. Kyle Busch kicked off his career at Hendrick Motorsports, spending three years there, and then joined Joe Gibbs’ fold for 15 years. He accrued 60 Cup Series race wins and 2 championships during that period. For 19 years, he won at least one race per year – sometimes going up to eight trophies (2008, 2018). But all that crashed to an end in 2024, when he broke that 19-year streak. Busch’s 18.3 average finish was the worst since his rookie year – 21.0 in 2005.

So, NASCAR insiders were heavily skeptical about Kyle Busch’s chances in 2025, his 20th year in the sport. In a recent episode of Performance Racing Network, a group of veterans gathered. They showed the ‘green flag’ or black flag’ to this pressing question: “Will Kyle Busch win before the Coca-Cola 600?”

Kyle Petty, 8x Cup Series race winner and eminent NASCAR personality, flatly declared: “Black flag, I’m sorry. I don’t think so, but then again, I’ve been wrong before. I’m just giving it a black flag… I got no reason.”

Kyle Busch has posted two top-tens already across three Cup races this season. At COTA, he was dangerously close to victory before mechanical issues descended. Yet, even that was not enough to convince Doug Rice, PRN President. “I do want him to, despite what I have said begrudgingly about him in the past. I want him to win. But I am just not feeling it. He could get one if they out-strategize people, or maybe he has another hot road course car, but no. Black flag.”

He reasoned with a four-word response: “Can’t outrun the calendar.” Another PRN executive, Alexis Erickson, chimed in: “Can’t outrun his age!”

Even Kyle Busch conceded to how challenging maintaining a two-decade streak is. “I would have much rather it been — if I’m going to run six, seven more years — it last 25, 26 years, and just make it a mark that will never be achievable, right? But unfortunately, those things didn’t happen… Honestly, for there being guys that are at 17 (years) and one guy was at 18, and now one guy at 19, it’s hard to put that many good years like that together in a row. It’s difficult.”

With the young drivers making their mark on NASCAR now, things are pretty tight for the old guard. They need to come up with ideas to stay afloat or run the risk of being left out.

However, Kyle Busch is still soaring in one area. Although his Cup Series pursuit seems to be in the doldrums, his Craftsman Truck Series is definitely not.

Busch is still pushing up his legend status

We all know the jaw-dropping stats Rowdy has accumulated across his career. Kyle Busch owns 232 wins across NASCAR’s three tiers. He is also the record holder for most wins in the Xfinity Series (102) and the Craftsman Truck Series (67). Incidentally, the latest Truck win came only two weeks ago.

Alongside his Cup Series schedule, Busch enrolled in a Truck schedule under the Spire Motorsports banner in 2025. And he breathed fire at Atlanta Motor Speedway, where he already had seven victories.

Leading a race-high 80 of the 135 laps, Kyle Busch fended off half a dozen trucks in the closing 20 laps. He pulled ahead of Stewart Friesen by just 20 yards at the finish line, posting a jaw-dropping .017-second win.

Busch beamed after his 67th Truck victory: “Awesome run for this Spire Chevrolet and everybody at [sponsor] Gainbridge…Trying to make sure I stayed as far forward as I possibly could…Those guys would cycle to me and get to the next one in front, next one in front of me, and I just made sure to keep battling back and got back to the front so I could control it the best I could. That inside [lane] was good, they were rolling forward so it made for a heck of a race.”

So maybe Kyle Busch is not entirely off his game yet. PRN host Alexis Erickson gave a green flag to him, so not all hope was lost for Rowdy.