Richard Childress airs frustration over 2024 RCR season

Richard Childress Racing was once one of the most dominant teams in the NASCAR Cup Series, fielding drivers such as the late Dale Earnhardt and Kevin Harvick.

Nowadays, success is hard to come by at RCR, even with two-time Cup Series champion Kyle Busch piloting the team’s No. 8 Chevrolet. Busch’s, as well as Austin Dillon’s struggles, are well documented this season. Dillon is back in 32nd in the points standings, while Busch is 104 points back of Alex Bowman for the 16th and final playoff spot and riding a career-long 40-race winless streak.

Richard Childress spoke of RCR’s season to this point ahead of Sunday’s Chicago Street Race and to sum it up in one word, “frustrating.”

“This is very frustrating,” Childress said Saturday, via Dustin Long of NBC Sports. “… We feel that we’ve got a good shot. We can still turn it around, it’s not over, but we’ve got a lot of things we’ve got to do to turn it around.”

Changes underway at RCR

RCR has seen a slight makeover in the last couple weeks with Andy Petree retiring from his role of vice president of competition, an abrupt retirement and quite curious given the race team’s hardships this season. Keith Rodden has taken over in the interim, giving RCR a new look at least in the short-term.

Despite this, Childress acknowledged that “you can’t fix it in the middle of the year.”

“You can’t fix it in the middle of the year,” Childress said. “A lot of it is engineering. I feel that we’re strong in a lot of areas and weak in some of the others. I want to beef up our engineering. We’ve got a lot of stuff that we’re working on and hopefully we can get both of them running better.”

Kyle Busch, RCR searching for answers during dismal season

Busch’s struggles have been the most perplexing given his career prior to joining RCR. Even then, he won three races in his first 15 starts last season but can’t seem to catch a break in 2024. Busch has finished just one of the last five races, the lone one coming at Sonoma when he ran out of gas on the final lap while running P5.

The heartbreak only continued this past Sunday at Nashville, when he wrecked during an overtime restart after Kyle Larson ran out of gas. Running P4 at the time, Busch finished 27th.

“It’s been so dismal and so heartbreaking that I have a hard time dealing with enough stuff in my life that every Sunday to keep adding to it is getting harder and harder to deal with,” Busch said Saturday.

Though frustrated, Childress remains actively involved in looking to turn things around at RCR.

“I’m more involved than I have been in several years because I want to get the right people to help me make the right decisions,” Childress said. “I don’t want to make all these decisions on my own. I’ve got to have the right people helping make those decisions.”