“You’re going to be very disappointed,” Denny Hamlin says Kyle Busch’s problem goes deeper than RCR

Kyle Busch’s slump is no longer a passing storyline or a bad month stretched across a headline. It has hardened into one of the defining realities of the current Cup Series: one of the most gifted drivers of his era, a two-time champion with 63 career wins, now sits deep in the standings and more than 100 races removed from his last trip to Victory Lane. The shock is not that Busch is struggling. It is that the struggle has lasted long enough to force a different kind of conversation around him.

That is the ground Denny Hamlin stepped onto this week. Speaking on his Actions Detrimental podcast, Hamlin did not frame Busch’s drought as a temporary dip or a simple Richard Childress Racing problem that can be fixed with one clean weekend. He treated it as a broader pattern, one tied to the demands of the Next Gen car and the changing shape of Cup competition.

Hamlin is talking about a driver who remains one of the most decorated full-time drivers in Cup history, and his last victory came as recently as June 4, 2023, when he won at World Wide Technology Raceway in his first season with RCR. At the time, the move from Joe Gibbs Racing looked revitalizing. Busch won three times in 2023. Since then, the trajectory has turned sharply the other way.

The standings underline how severe the slide has become. After Bristol, Busch was 24th in Cup points with 131, only seven ahead of teammate Austin Dillon in 27th. For a driver of Busch’s standard, that is not just a slow start. It is evidence of how far the weekly baseline has dropped in a series where the margin between contending and disappearing can be measured in a few tenths and a few decisions.

1. Denny Hamlin’s Shock Prediction

Motorsport’s report on Hamlin’s podcast distilled the core of his argument. “If you’re expecting Kyle Busch to just go back to Victory Lane, you’re going to be very disappointed. I just think that, until we change the car or something changes, something has to change, and I have no idea,” Hamlin said. In the same discussion, he said Busch has “struggled for five years now” and argued that the issue did not begin at Richard Childress Racing. Hamlin did not isolate the slump to Busch’s current team alone, even with RCR mired in its own difficult start to 2026. He traced the problem back through Busch’s final seasons at Joe Gibbs Racing and into the full Next Gen era, which began in 2022.

In Hamlin’s telling, this is not a simple matter of a driver landing in the wrong garage. It is a longer-running mismatch between Busch and the car itself. He said Busch won three times in 2023 during a phase when teams were still “guessing” on setups with the Next Gen platform, but that parity has since tightened and the burden on the driver to find the last bit of speed has grown. Hamlin’s argument is not that Busch suddenly lost talent. In fact, he went out of his way to avoid that suggestion, saying he “can’t hold a helmet” to Busch talent-wise. The point was narrower and harsher at the same time: raw ability has not disappeared, but the translation from ability to repeatable speed has. In a series defined by iteration and adaptation, that gap is enough to bury even a Hall of Fame résumé on a weekly basis.

2. Standings Prove Kyle Busch’s Slump Is Real

There is no cleaner marker for the problem than the winless streak. Busch has not won a Cup race since that June 2023 victory at World Wide Technology Raceway, and by the end of March his drought had reached 100 races. Motorsport noted that no active full-time driver has more Cup wins than Busch’s 63, which is what gives the number its bite: this is not an ordinary driver going cold, but one of the most successful racers of the modern era stuck in the longest barren stretch of his top-series career. The standings do not offer much relief. After eight races in 2026, Busch was 24th with 131 points, outside the top 20 and only narrowly ahead of Dillon. He had one top-five finish and no wins. Dillon, meanwhile, was 27th with 124. The problem is not isolated to one side of the RCR shop, but Busch’s placement is the one that changes the tenor of the conversation because his standard is entirely different. Even the weekly results reflect that flattening effect. At Bristol, Busch finished 25th, one lap down, in another race that offered no sign of a breakthrough. That kind of finish is survivable once or twice. In the middle of a three-year drought, it becomes evidence of stasis. The arc of the RCR move makes the downturn sharper. Busch arrived in 2023, won three times almost immediately, and appeared to have found a second act after his long run at JGR ended. RCR and Busch then agreed on an extension through 2026, a decision announced in May 2025 with the team still expressing confidence that the pairing could turn the trend back upward. Nearly a year later, the extension stands, but the momentum that once justified it has thinned considerably.

3. Is Kyle Busch’s Talent Obsolete in the Next Gen Era?

The Next Gen platform was designed in part to tighten competition and standardize more of the field. Over time, that has made weekly edges harder to create and easier to lose. Hamlin’s point is that when the field was still learning the car in 2023, Busch’s talent could capitalize on the uncertainty. As teams closed the knowledge gap, that opening narrowed. The result is a series in which adaptation matters as much as pedigree. That helps explain why Hamlin treated the issue as larger than RCR, even while the team’s current form remains poor. If the car places a premium on a specific kind of feel, balance management or setup interaction that Busch has not mastered consistently, then better weekends alone do not solve the underlying problem. Something more structural has to change, in the car, in the setup philosophy, or in the way Busch accesses the platform’s limits. It also explains why the usual “he’ll figure it out” language has lost force. Busch has already had time with two organizations in the broader period Hamlin referenced. The clock is no longer measured in weeks. It is measured in years of trying to recapture a version of speed that used to appear almost on command. RCR’s 2026 results have offered no clear signal that a turnaround is imminent. Kansas entry lists show the team rolling forward with the same basic structure, Busch in the No. 8 and Dillon in the No. 3, but the weekly reality remains unchanged. They need speed first, then stability, then something resembling momentum. None of that has appeared consistently enough yet to make Hamlin’s warning sound overstated. The immediate stakes are straightforward. Busch still has time to salvage the season, but the burden is no longer just on him to snap a streak. It is on RCR and the broader competitive package around him to prove there is still a version of this pairing that can matter at the front of the Cup field.

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