Joe Gibbs Racing driver Kyle Busch says the 2017 NASCAR Cup season had made him want to pull his hair out before his recent victories at Pocono and Bristol.
Busch has led all but five races so far this season, but two second-place finishes – at Martinsville and Charlotte – were the best results he had managed before a breakthrough win at Pocono at the end of last month.
That success ended a winless run of 36 races, and Busch followed that up with victory at Bristol last weekend.
“We’ve had really strong cars and had really good opportunities to win a lot of races this year. We just haven’t gotten it, for whatever reason,” Busch said.
“There’s no store you go to to buy luck. Luck was probably the biggest thing we were missing out on.
“It’s just starting to turn around a little bit. Things are going a little bit better in our direction.
“Some of those lucky breaks are kind of floating our way rather than somebody else’s way. Take them when you can get them is my mentality.
“It’s so frustrating, though, for this season to be as fast [and] as competitive as we’ve been, the opportunities that were there for us to be able to score the victories, and to not get those.
“It just makes you really literally want to pull all your hair out.”
Busch completed a second career clean sweep of wins in the Cup and (second- and third-tier) Xfinity and Truck races in a single meeting at Bristol, and now has 180 wins across the three categories.
He said the near misses that had extended his barren spell earlier in the season had been difficult to deal with.
“Being able to score the win just kind of relieves all that [pressure],” he added.
“People look at me probably like I’m crazy, [because] I win a lot.
“But it’s so hard to win these Cup races that when these ones slip away, it definitely makes you way, way angrier than the other ones.”