KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Kyle Busch fired back at Denny Hamlin on Saturday at Kansas Speedway after the fellow Cup driver used his weekly podcast to question Busch’s recent form. Busch said Hamlin did not know what he was talking about and added that he could make Hamlin’s life hell if he kept bashing him.
The exchange came as NASCAR Cup Series teams prepared for Sunday’s race at Kansas, where Busch and Austin Dillon were separated by seven points in the standings and were both averaging a 22nd-place finish. Hamlin had argued that Busch should be doing better than Dillon in the Richard Childress Racing car, a barbed comparison for a driver with Busch’s résumé and one that touched off a blunt response in the garage.
Hamlin’s criticism on Actions Detrimental centered on Busch’s drought and on the expectation that a driver of his caliber should not be leaving that much on the table. He said Busch has struggled for five years now, has not won in nearly three years and should not be expected to suddenly flip a switch. He also said Busch ought to be able to carry the RCR car to better finishes than Dillon, who has six Cup wins.
Busch pushed back just as hard. He said he would switch cars with Hamlin “any day of the week, anytime” and wanted Hamlin to prove he could carry the car better than he can. The back-and-forth put a sharper edge on a familiar NASCAR debate: how much of a driver’s slump belongs to the car, and how much belongs to the driver himself.
Busch’s run at Richard Childress Racing has not matched the early promise he showed after leaving Joe Gibbs Racing in 2022. He won three races in his first four months with RCR, but has not won since and is in the middle of what could become a third straight winless season. That recent stretch has made every comparison with Dillon, his teammate, feel larger than the points gap suggests.
Hamlin said he was not ignoring Busch’s talent. “Kyle Busch, I can’t hold the guy’s helmet talent-wise,” he said, but he added that expecting Busch to go back to victory lane regularly would be a mistake. Hamlin also said Busch had adapted well to previous generations of cars and pointed out that the feel of NASCAR’s Next Gen car is similar to the Gen 6 machine. For that reason, he said, Busch’s later years at JGR in the Gen 6 car were also not good. “Something is just not registering,” Hamlin said, adding that he does not think age has turned off the light switch for Busch but that something does not feel right.
That leaves Busch with the kind of pressure that no quote can brush off. The next race at Kansas offers another chance to answer on the track, which is still the only place either man can settle the argument. For Busch, the question is no longer whether he can talk back. It is whether he can make the car and the results speak for him again.
