RICHMOND, Va. — Kyle Busch said he sprained his left wrist in a late-race crash during the NASCAR Cup Series’ most recent event at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but that he will not need a relief driver on standby for Sunday’s race at Richmond Raceway.
“Grip it and rip it,” Busch said.
Busch arrived for post-qualifying interviews Saturday with a bandage wrap on his left wrist, saying that the steering wheel snapped around when his No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet crashed in the July 21 Brickyard 400.
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“Without two weeks off, I would not have been able to race,” Busch said, saying that nothing was broken. “I’m good. I’m pretty good now.”
Busch is set to start 12th in Sunday’s Cook Out 400 (6 p.m. ET, USA, NBC Sports App, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). It’s his best starting spot since he qualified seventh at Iowa Speedway, six races ago on June 16.
The two-time Cup Series champion has struggled this season, sitting 112 points back of the elimination line in the provisional playoffs picture with four races remaining before the 16-driver field is set. He has failed to finish in five of the last eight races, sinking to 18th in the series standings.
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Busch said changes are afoot to mark improvement at the Childress organization. The No. 8 team has brought in a new engineer in Ben Lynch, who had worked with the No. 3 Chevrolet group for teammate Austin Dillon. Busch just missed making the final round of qualifying Saturday, and Dillon set the pace in Cup Series practice before locking up the sixth starting position — his second-best qualifying result this year.
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“So far, so good. Good start, but just trying to mix things up, change things up, and find a direction that we can continue to improve the whole program, and seems as though this weekend was a good kickoff to that,” Busch said, before being asked about which areas he’d like to see RCR focus on for the remainder of the season.
“I don’t know that you’re going to find everything that you’re missing right now without making complete, key new hires from outside, which they’re also working on,” he added. “And so I could be more optimistic, probably, of next year’s stuff than how we finished this year, but we know we need to finish strong, and we’ve got to do it with what we’ve got.”