Richard Childress Racing announced Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway that its flagship driver, Kyle Busch, will remain with the organization in 2026.
Busch, currently in the last year of a three-year deal with RCR, had been non-committal about his plans for next season prior to Saturday’s news.
The team has picked up the one-year option on Busch’s original contract, which expires at the end of 2025.
Excited to fight with the 🎱 team for another yr! https://t.co/DY4L3yDwhi
— Kyle Busch (@KyleBusch) May 24, 2025
Kyle Busch Remains On The Market For 2027 NASCAR Season
To be clear: Kyle Busch has not signed a contract extension with RCR. So, for now, it’s just the one-year option.
Although Busch’s plans for 2027 and beyond remain up in the air, the two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion seems happy to know he’ll be sticking with RCR for at least the short-term.
“It’s a great place to be, a great place to work, a great atmosphere, and a lot of grit and determination with a lot of people up there in Welcome, North Carolina,” Busch said of the team’s headquarters. “We have certainly had our battles. It’s been fun but yet challenging. It definitely isn’t easy. This sport is very, very tough, very, very close and challenging.
“We know those areas in which we can improve both behind the wheel, on pit road, in engineering, all of the above.”
Kyle Busch: Finding Consistent Speed Still A Struggle
After earning three wins and making the playoffs in Year One with RCR following a largely successful 15-year run with Joe Gibbs Racing, Kyle Busch failed to reach Victory Lane in 2024. It was the first season in his lengthy full-time driving career, which began with Hendrick Motorsports in 2005, that he didn’t record a single win.
Busch is winless in the first 12 races of this season and is 17th in the standings but has shown signs of improvement from last year, when he missed the playoffs for the first time since 2012.
Still, Busch isn’t as fast as he wants to be with his No. 8 Chevrolet.
“I feel like there’s times in the race where we do have top speed, but it’s not the whole race,” said Busch, a winner of over 200 NASCAR national series races, including 63 in the Cup Series. “So we’ve got to work on beginning to end and being able to put everything together. That’s a big part of what you see. A lot of these guys that are winning right now, they’re just good from start to finish. So that’s a big piece of what we’re doing.”
Richard Childress Expects Kyle Busch To Win A Championship At RCR
Speaking on Saturday ahead of Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600, team owner Richard Childress was upbeat about the direction he believes the company is headed in with Kyle Busch.
“We’ve got some exciting things coming up,” said Childress, a NASCAR Hall of Famer and six-time NASCAR Cup Series champion team owner. “Kyle and I are both alike in one area — that we don’t like to lose. We want to win races. I still think Kyle will win him a championship, and we’re going to have it at RCR. That’s our plans. We’ve got a lot of new things coming.”
Childress indicated that a point of emphasis for RCR in the coming weeks and months will be bolstering its engineering efforts in the Next Generation Cup Series car, which replaced the old Gen-6 model in 2022.
“This car is a lot different,” Childress said. “It’s so engineer-driven that we’re stepping our engineering up more. And I’m excited about the future of where we can go.
“Watching Kyle race and working with him, it’s been a great pleasure. You know, he’s a champion. Here’s the guy that’s won over 200 NASCAR races. His career is not even close to being over.”
Busch, who recently celebrated his 40th birthday, echoed that sentiment on Saturday, noting that he plans to remain in the sport long enough to possibly share a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series entry with son Brexton, who recently turned 10.
“There’s kind of the vision or the plan, if you will, on being able to race in some Truck races with Brexton,” Busch said. “So obviously, that’s six years from now before he can make that start. That would sort of be an idea of when I would look at stepping aside from Cup Series racing. But, you know, it’s a long ways out.”
