Kyle Busch’s 2025 NASCAR season has been less of a campaign and more of a traveling demolition derby—only with Busch often finding himself as both unwilling participant and accidental conductor. Saturday night at Richmond was no exception.
By lap 199, Busch was already slogging through another miserable outing, clawing for relevance somewhere around the no-man’s land just outside the top 15. Out of Turn 2, he attempted to guide his battered Chevrolet down the banking. Unfortunately, Chase Briscoe had the exact same bright idea.
The result? Physics.
Busch clipped the rear of Briscoe’s Toyota, sending it pirouetting majestically up the track. For Briscoe, it was a waltz. For everyone else, it was rush hour on I-95 with the world’s worst GPS. Eight cars piled in like sardines, crunching steel and scraping fenders, while a few lucky souls slipped through on the inside with the grace of panicked gazelles.
One of those gazelles was Chase Elliott. He slid past, likely whispering a silent thank-you to the racing gods. His relief, however, lasted about as long as a TikTok video.
Because Busch wasn’t finished.
Somehow, his car emerged from the pile-up still charging, while Elliott’s was limping away like a wounded antelope. Busch, at full song, caught up to the slower No. 9 and promptly spun him nose-first into the outside wall. The crowd groaned. Elliott’s night was done.
Physically, Elliott was fine. Mechanically? His engine was cooked, his Hendrick Chevrolet was terminal, and the driver who had missed just one lap all season suddenly found himself with an early shower and the ignominy of finishing dead last.
“I think Kyle (Busch) just didn’t know that we were trying to squeeze by the wreck on the bottom,” Elliott said afterward, trying very hard to be diplomatic but sounding every bit like a man whose evening had just been ruined by a torpedo with a familiar number on the side. “He was kind of angled back towards the bottom of the racetrack, and I was just coming through. It’s just unfortunate.”
That “unfortunate” bit does a lot of heavy lifting. Elliott had started the race strongly, only to tumble backward thanks to pit road penalties and bad track position. Yet by Stage Two, the car had finally come alive again.
“We had a good start to the race,” Elliott said. “We kind of got on the wrong end there in the beginning and lost some track position. We got behind the No. 19 (Chase Briscoe) and got a penalty. I thought we were in a pretty good spot right there. We finally got on some better tires and we were making our way through there well, so I was excited to see where that was going to go, but unfortunately, we didn’t get the chance.”
Instead of clawing back points on his Hendrick teammate William Byron in the regular season standings—where Elliott came in trailing by 42—he left Richmond deeper in the hole, clutching nothing but a twisted race car and another reason to curse Kyle Busch’s luck.
Meanwhile, Busch limped on with a car that looked like it had been through a bar fight—and somehow still had enough speed to keep annoying everyone else.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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