Eight visits to Victory Lane highlighted the 2018 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season for Kyle Busch.
Busch finished fourth in the season’s final standings after putting together a stellar campaign that included eight wins, 22 top fives, 28 top 10s and four poles.
He advanced to the Championship 4 race at Homestead-Miami Speedway in search of a second career title but finished fourth in the season finale.
“I feel like we did miss it at Homestead,” he said. “It wasn’t any of the team’s fault or anything like that. I think when it all boils down to it our sim programs and everything else can tell us whatever it wants to tell us but in all reality I’m the most expensive sim tool we got as an organization.
“I should have been able to do a better job of describing, talking or figuring out where the heck we were or what was going on and we just could never push the right button. We talked about the same issues all weekend long since we unloaded.”
But along the way he won three straight races (Bristol, Richmond, Texas) and scored a Cup win at Charlotte in May to give him victories on every active track in the series before the debut of the Roval in the fall.
“Winning eight races and winning the Coke 600, checking off the list of another big race, winning at all the racetracks and things like that make it certainly successful, but at the end of the day you come to the awards ceremony and you are celebrating somebody else being a champion,” Busch said summing up his year.
“The end of year awards also none of those were mine with the amount of success we had with laps we led, poles we had, races we won. None of it means anything. The focus is now on 2019.”
2018 Statistics
| Wins | Top 5s | Top 10s | Laps Led | Avg. Start | Avg. Finish | Driver Rating |
| 8 | 22 | 28 | 1,469 | 7.4 | 8.3 | 109.3 |
Busch returns to JGR next season but will have a new teammate in 2017 champion Martin Truex Jr., who takes over the team’s No. 19 ride after Furniture Row racing shuttered its doors at season’s end. Busch is looking forward to pairing up with Truex Jr. along with JGT holdovers Denny Hamlin and Erik Jones.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Busch said. “I think it was very important for us to get Martin and to get Cole. They are very good at what they do. They do a really job of preparing and setting up really fast racecars and getting the most of out of those as well, even from a satellite location. I feel like that will strengthen our program bringing them in-house.”
But from now until the season cranks back up after the New Year, Busch is planning on spending time off the radar with family.
“Lay low and just chill,” Busch said of his plans. “We have been doing so much lately that Christmas will be nice to kind of spend at home and relax a little bit. New Year’s is our anniversary so figuring out some things to do with that and possibly have a vacation somewhere before we all get back going again.”
2018 Season Reviews – Monster Energy Cup Series Playoff Drivers
