Kyle Busch’s quest for a Daytona 500 win will start from the pole position on Sunday.
Busch earned the top spot in front row qualifying for the Daytona 500 on Wednesday night with a lap of 183.925 MPH in the second round of qualifying. Busch’s lap usurped Chase Briscoe from the top spot in the final round. Briscoe started last year’s Daytona 500 on the pole.
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Sunday will mark Busch’s 21st start in the Daytona 500 as he chases his first win in NASCAR’s biggest race. His winless streak is longer than any other active driver’s and is even longer than Dale Earnhardt’s. The seven-time champion won the 1998 Daytona 500 in his 20th start.
Earnhardt won that race while driving for Richard Childress Racing, the same team that Busch currently drives for. The 2026 season is Busch’s fourth with RCR after moving over from Joe Gibbs Racing. And Busch is looking to recapture the form he had with JGR.
Busch, 40, has 63 Cup Series wins across 750 starts. But he hasn’t won in each of the last two seasons after scoring three wins in his first season with RCR in 2023.
At JGR, Busch won the 2015 and 2019 Cup Series titles as he won 40 races in the 2010s. Busch missed the Daytona 500 in 2015 after suffering a broken leg in the Xfinity Series race the day before. But he returned after missing 11 races and went on to win five of the remaining 25 races that season to win his first title.
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Daytona has not been terribly kind to Busch in the Cup Series, either. Across 41 starts, Busch has just one win and 13 top-10 finishes. That win came in the 2008 summer race and just five of his top 10s at the track have come in the Daytona 500.
