Whenever Kyle Busch shows up to his hometown track at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, he always expects to turn in a dominant performance. And, while his third-place finish at the 2021 Pennzoil 400 was a solid showing for Busch — who, up until that point in the Cup Series season, hadn't secured anything better than a 10th-place finish — it certainly wasn't as sweet as a celebratory ride into victory lane would have been. As Ricky Bobby's dad says in the classic comedy Talladega Nights, "If you ain't first, you're last." Busch tends to take that saying to heart more often than not.
Now, when things don't go Rowdy's way on the track, he tends to be pretty vocal about it, whether over his team's radio or in a post-race interview. In the instance of the 2021 Vegas race, Busch opted to give his team an earful right then and there. Let's just say that they had to bleep out about half of the two-time Cup champ's fired-up radio rant.
As you can hear from the footage, Busch yells, "Same old f***ing s*** every f***ing week, every f***ing year! Same old f***ing s***!" He then adds, "Plowing-ass f***ing tight. Slow as f***ing molasses!"
It seems like Busch just needed to vent out some serious frustration in the moment, because when analyzing his Joe Gibbs Racing team's performance in Vegas at the post-race press conference, he was a little more levelheaded.
"I felt like [Sunday] was a good building process for us," Busch said. "I just always kept trying to give the best feedback I possibly could. Being able to tell him what the car was doing, where we were coming from with the adjustments we were making. [Crew chief Ben Beshore] was making good adjustments all day. Seemed like the first two or three of them really didn't do anything. We started taking swings with wrenches in the back window, stuff like that."
"Some of the teams that have had a rough start, like ourselves first few races being terrible. We kind of had a hole that we had to dig ourselves out of. We've been working on that each week, getting closer."
While Busch would go on to win two races in 2021 — the May race at Kansas and the June race at Pocono — he would end up placing ninth in the standings, which marked his worst finish in the Cup standings since 2014 (when he placed 10th). Towards the end of that season, it seemed like the writing was on the wall for his eventual departure from JGR, and after the 2022 season, Busch teamed up with Richard Childress Racing. Now, Kyle has yet to launch into any expletive-laced radio diatribes during his time with RCR so far. But, he's certainly not in the clear yet. We'll just have to wait and see how he does in Vegas this year.
