Frustrated amid a winless season, two-time NASCAR champ Kyle Busch says he 'could legit win Daytona'

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Kyle Busch is masking his disappointment. He’s hiding his frustration and walking through the NASCAR garage trying not to let anyone see how challenging this season has been for the two-time Cup Series champion.

“I’m a great actor, apparently,” he quipped.

Busch is winless in 45 races, his last victory coming at Gateway Park outside St. Louis on June 4, 2023. The growing skid has him in a precarious position heading into Saturday night’s race at Daytona International Speedway.

Busch needs to win one of the two regular-season races remaining — Daytona and Darlington — to secure a spot in the playoff field for the 12th consecutive year. He last missed the postseason in 2012.

“We could legit win Daytona,” Busch confidently said Thursday during a Zoom call, pointing to a 12th-place finish at the famed speedway in February, strong runs at similar tracks in Atlanta and Talladega and even a fourth-place showing last week at Michigan.

Maybe he's putting a spin on the situation. After all, Busch has one win in 38 starts at the birthplace of NASCAR. Either way, the 39-year-old Busch didn't try to conceal his discontent with how his season has unfolded.

“It’s tough because, when you have done as well as you’ve done and the success and the accolades and everything that you’ve had and you get run over, beat down, all that sort of stuff, it’s hard to get yourself back up again and to go back out there,” Busch said. “But I’ve been down before, although probably never as long or as low as this has been.”

Busch ranks 18th in the playoff standings, 93 points behind Bubba Wallace and 94 behind Ross Chastain, who has a tenuous grip on the final postseason spot.

Twelve drivers are locked into the 16-man playoff field thanks to wins: Kyle Larson, Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell, Tyler Reddick, William Byron, Ryan Blaney, Chase Elliott, Brad Keselowski, Austin Cindric, Joey Logano, Daniel Suarez and Alex Bowman.

Five other winless drivers are vying for the four remaining spots: Martin Truex Jr., Ty Gibbs, Chris Buescher, Chastain and Wallace.

“Daytona and Darlington are two good tracks for us,” Wallace said. “Just got to keep the flow going.”

Everyone else is in desperation mode. Always-chaotic Daytona has provided plenty of surprise winners in recent years — Buescher and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in 2023, Austin Dillon and Austin Cindric in 2022, Michael McDowell in 2021, Justin Haley in 2019 and Erik Jones in 2018.

“Seems like we all lose our mind at the end of races (at Daytona) and just hold the throttle down until we get to the front,” Stenhouse said.

Added Byron: “There’s a lot of luck involved, as we all know.”

So no one should be ruled out Saturday night — including Busch, whose lone victory at Daytona came in 2008.

“Fact of the matter is the better you run, the more consistent you run, it gives you that confidence going into each weekend that you can do it again,” he said.

Busch has more on the line than his playoff streak. He also holds the NASCAR record for the most consecutive years with a victory, a run that started in 2005.

He broke Hall of Famer Richard Petty’s mark of 18 in a row, which he set between 1960 and 1977. Because drivers eliminated from the playoffs still compete in the 10 postseason races, Busch has time to extend that record.

“You try to keep it going as long as you can,” Busch said. “You want to set that year mark as high as you possibly can, just to try to not let anybody ever get there again. Look at how many years it stood for Richard Petty before I was able to get it.”

NASCAR is mandating the use a right-side, rear-window air deflector at Daytona, a direct result of Corey LaJoie’s strange flip at Michigan International Speedway on Monday.

LaJoie’s No. 7 Chevrolet turned sideways, got airborne without making contact with another car and then landed on its roof and slid hundreds of feet before rolling once it touched the infield grass. He was uninjured.

“If they want to call it the ‘LaJoie fin,’ I'll take an innovation for the car,” LaJoie said. “I hear it makes the liftoff speed go up 40 mph, so I'm sure it changes how the car's going to drive and how side-drafting affects it.”

Busch suggested NASCAR needs to start summer races earlier, specifically at tracks without lights like Michigan International Speedway, to build in more time for rain delays.

“When you’re in the middle of summer and you’re at these places with no lights, you got to start earlier and try to get what you can get in for the fans that are there," Busch said. "(They) give up their time and their money and their weekends to make it there, to make your show look better on TV with butts in the seats.

“You owe it to those people."

AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing

FILE - Kyle Busch (18) and Martin Truex Jr. (19) drive during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Michigan International Speedway, Monday, Aug. 19, 2024, in Brooklyn, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

FILE - Kyle Busch is introduced before a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Michigan International Speedway, Sunday, Aug. 18, 2024, in Brooklyn, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

BOSTON (AP) — A study that explores the feasibility of using pigeons to guide missiles and one that looks at the swimming abilities of dead fish were among the winners Thursday of this year’s Ig Nobels, the prize for comical scientific achievement.

Held less than a month before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced, the 34th annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was organized by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine’s website to make people laugh and think. Winners received a transparent box containing historic items related to Murphy’s Law — the theme of the night — and a nearly worthless Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill. Actual Nobel laureates handed the winners their prizes.

“While some politicians were trying to make sensible things sound crazy, scientists discovered some crazy-sounding things that make a lot of sense,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, said in an e-mail interview.

The ceremony started with Kees Moliker, winner of 2003 Ig Noble for biology, giving out safety instructions. His prize was for a study that documented the existence of homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks.

“This is the duck,” he said, holding up a duck. “This is the dead one.”

After that, someone came on stage wearing a yellow target on their chest and a plastic face mask. Soon, they were inundated with people in the audience throwing paper airplanes at them.

Then, the awards began — several dry presentations which were interrupted by a girl coming on stage and repeatedly yelling “Please stop. I'm bored.” The awards ceremony was also was broken up by an international song competition inspired by Murphy's Law, including one about coleslaw and another about the legal system.

The winners were honored in 10 categories, including for peace and anatomy. Among them were scientists who showed a vine from Chile imitates the shapes of artificial plants nearby and another study that examined whether the hair on people's heads in the Northern Hemisphere swirled in the same direction as someone's hair in the Southern Hemisphere.

Other winners include a group of scientists who showed that fake medicine that causes side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that doesn't cause side effects and one showing that some mammals are cable of breathing through their anus — winners who came on stage wearing a fish-inspired hats.

Julie Skinner Vargas accepted the peace prize on behalf of her late father B.F. Skinner, who wrote the pigeon-missile study. Skinner Vargas is also the head of the B.F. Skinner Foundation.

“I want to thank you for finally acknowledging his most important contribution,” she said. “Thank you for putting the record straight.”

James Liao, a biology professor at the University of Florida, accepted the physics prize for his study demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.

“I discovered that a live fish moved more than a dead fish but not by much,” Liao said, holding up a fake fish. “A dead trout towed behind a stick also flaps its tail to the beat of the current like a live fish surfing on swirling eddies, recapturing the energy in its environment. A dead fish does live fish things.”

Professor James Liao displays a stuffed fish while accepting a prize for physics for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout during a performance at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

A team of researchers perform a demonstration during a performance showing that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus while accepting the 2024 Ig Nobel prize in physiology at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass., Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

People in the audience throw paper airplanes toward the stage during a performance at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

FILE - Students walk past the "Great Dome" atop Building 10 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Mass, April 3, 2017. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)