Denny Hamlin is moving ever closer to Kyle Busch’s Cup Series win total, and the chase now sits beside one of NASCAR’s strangest modern droughts. Busch has 63 Cup wins, but he has gone almost three full years and 100 starts without another one.
That is what makes the comparison land now. Busch once won at least one race every year from 2005 through 2023, a run that turned consistency into a habit and made every slump before it feel temporary. He also opened the 2026 season by winning pole position for the Daytona 500, which only sharpened the contrast between speed in qualifying and results on race day.
Busch’s last Cup victory came at Gateway on June 4, 2023, when he led 121 of 243 laps from pole position. He had already won three of the first 15 races that season, and he looked for a while like the sort of driver who could keep the streak alive almost by force. Instead, the wins stopped there. Since Gateway, he has seven finishes of either second or third and has led 381 laps, but nothing has broken the drought.
The downturn has deepened again in 2026. Busch has not scored a top ten in the first seven races, and Austin Dillon has also failed to post one in that same span. For Busch, that is a notable slide at Bristol, where he has eight Cup wins but no finish higher than 14th in the Next Gen era aside from a Bristol Dirt win in 2022. The numbers do not support the idea that he is simply one good weekend away from a reset.
Some of the blame falls on Richard Childress Racing, some on Busch’s age and some on how he has adapted to the Gen-7 car. More immediately, Busch has been fighting an ill-handling No. 8 Chevrolet most race weekends as Chevrolet works through its own adjustment to the updated ZL1 body. The equipment is not behaving like a front-running car should, and that has left Busch trying to win back pace before he can think about winning races.
There is precedent for long waits ending. Brad Keselowski snapped a 110-race winless streak at Darlington in 2024, and Bill Elliott once went 226 races between victories later in his career. Busch is not close to those extremes yet, but he is close enough that every week without a win makes the drought look less like a blip and more like part of the story. If Hamlin keeps winning while Busch keeps searching, the gap between them will tell readers more than any points table can.
Ty Gibbs drew strong defense from Denny Hamlin before Bristol race
