Graph of the Day: Kyle Busch’s Career Finish Spectrum

As he embarks on a new phase of his career with Richard Childress Racing, it’s time to re-examine Kyle Busch’s career finish spectrum.

Okay, okay. I made up the term ‘finish spectrum’, but that’s really the best description of what this is. It’s a way to look at a driver’s finishes over time on a single graph.

A number of things stand out on Kyle Busch’s career finish spectrum. I generated it because I’m working on a prediction of how Kyle Busch will do at his new home.

Kyle’s career has had two lulls.

• The first was from 2012-2014. Although he won four races in 2013, he won only one race in 2012 and in 2014.
• The second one, from 2020-2022 looks similar, although he only won two races in the in-between year of 2021.

What Busch accomplished after the first lull — and the fact that he’s Kyle Busch — ought to convince anyone not to write off 2023 just because the preceding years weren’t so good.

Other Notable Features

• Busch earned fewer top-five finishes in 2022 than he did in 2015, when he only ran 25 of the 36 races.
• Aside from the anomalous 2015 year, Busch hasn’t finished out of the top 15 this much since 2014.
• Busch had 7 finishes of P31 or worse in 2022 which, again, he hadn’t had since 2014.

I’ll have an article up sometime this week on NBCSports.com expanding on this info.