The Richard Childress Racing transporter has spent much of 2026 looking like a traveling support group. Long faces. Bad luck. Cars that handled like shopping carts with one bent wheel.
But Sunday at Watkins Glen International, for a few glorious hours, RCR looked like RCR again.
Austin Dillon finished sixth. Kyle Busch finished eighth. Both cars were in the fight all afternoon, and in Busch’s case, he was doing it while sounding like a man who’d been trapped inside an over-air-conditioned pharmacy for a week.
Because midway through the race, Busch calmly radioed his team with the sort of sentence that usually precedes either a heroic comeback or a scene from an old western.
“I’m going to need a shot.”
Not a shot at the win. An actual medical shot.
The FS1 broadcast later clarified Busch wanted Dr. William Heisel to meet him at the team bus after the race, with Busch reportedly battling a sinus cold throughout the week. This was also the same weekend Busch skipped the Truck Series race, with Connor Mosack filling in.
And yet there Busch was, muscling the No. 8 Chevrolet around one of the most physically demanding road courses in NASCAR while apparently feeling like a microwaved corpse.
Honestly, it may have been one of Busch’s grittiest drives in years.
He started 21st, clawed his way forward through strategy and adjustments, and spent much of the afternoon looking like a legitimate top-five threat before fuel mileage turned the closing laps into a rolling science experiment.
“Strong day for the No. 8 zone Jalapeño Lime Chevrolet,” Busch said afterward. “We were a Top 10 car for the majority of the race, and ended eighth here at Watkins Glen International. We made the adjustments and strategy calls we needed to drive forward and make up track position after qualifying 21st, despite battling a car that trended tight throughout the race.
“We ran out of fuel at the end of the race, but we’re still going home with our second Top-10 finish of the season.”
That last bit says everything about RCR’s season. Second top-10 finish of the year. In May.
For a team with Busch and Dillon behind the wheel, that statistic lands with all the elegance of a bowling ball through a dining room table.
Still, Watkins Glen at least offered signs of life.
Dillon, who has quietly become one of NASCAR’s better road course racers when things actually go right, used aggressive strategy and fuel saving to grab sixth.
And apparently, Busch decided late in the race that fuel conservation was for cowards.
“He scared me into the bus stop with like two to go,” Dillon laughed afterward. “He just gave up on saving fuel.”
That’s vintage Kyle Busch, really. Feverish, congested, needing medical attention, and still driving into the bus stop like a man attempting to escape tax collectors.
Dillon admitted he probably could have pushed harder himself because he actually made it to the finish with fuel left, while Busch ran dry right at the line. But for once, the result almost didn’t matter.
What mattered was this: both RCR cars were relevant. Competitive. Visible at the front instead of mired somewhere between 19th and existential crisis.
For one afternoon in the Finger Lakes, Richard Childress Racing looked less like a team searching for answers and more like one finally remembering where it left them.
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.