Kevin Harvick: It's time to push the panic button for Kyle Busch

Kevin Harvick thinks that Kyle Busch needs to start making some big moves now so he can clinch a spot in the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs. On his Happy Hour podcast, Harvick said Busch is one of the drivers who needs to push the panic button.

“If one more car wins, it’s Kyle Busch down a couple of spots,” Harvick said. “They just need some consistency to be able to stop bleeding. It’s not all of their doing. Some of it is just bad luck. But they just can’t get out of the middle of all the bad luck.”

An example of the back luck came on Sunday when Busch was battling with Ross Chastain for fifth place. Chastain hit Busch and spun him off the track. Busch earned a P12 finish but, the team needed a top-five finish to get as many points as possible as the regular season winds down.

NASCAR insider weighs in on Kyle Busch ‘frustrating’ season

Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic shared his thoughts on Busch on The Teardown podcast. “For Kyle Busch, this is just a continuation of what has been a very frustrating, and way be-gone season, of just misery,” Bianchi explained. “You have speed in your race car again, for the second week in a row, and this time you again leave with a finish. Now, this wasn’t necessarily your mistake, like a week ago, but still, you’re looking at the standings, and he’s eight points out of a playoff spot. So, he was going to finish top five, that’s the difference between being in a playoff spot, and not being in a playoff spot. Those points are going to be so valuable, and it just seems like this team, whether it’s last week at Gateway or this week, earlier in the year, when they’re having issues on pit road, they have just thrown away a lot of points this year, and it’s not good.

“It more often than not ends up biting you in the butt, when you’re on the playoff bubble, and these are going to be a very long ten weeks for this team. Very nervous ten weeks. Because the reality is too, they don’t appear like they’re close to winning. I know Austin Cindric came out of nowhere and won last week, and that can certainly happen with Kyle. We know that, he’s got the talent. RCR’s got the ability to do that. But consistency matters, and they just don’t have consistent speed to think that they’re going to go out there and win a race somewhere.”

On3’s Steve Samra contributed to this story.