This past Saturday night at Richmond Raceway saw great action and a major development in the NASCAR playoffs. But, it’s still not time to shut the book on NASCAR’s last short track race of the regular season. So, who were the biggest losers from NASCAR’s weekend at Richmond Raceway?
This may have been Kyle Busch’s low point—not the close finish at Daytona last summer or the second-place finish in the cutoff race last season. Richmond 2025 is the low point in Kyle Busch’s Cup Series career. Busch made waves Saturday night and not for the right reasons, catching not only chasing Briscoe, but also Chase Elliott (insert 2008 Richmond joke) in a major crash, and, according to Denny Hamlin, “door slamming” the No. 11 during pace laps. To understand this chaos, we appeal to Dale Tanhardt:
Whether those actions were intentional or not shouldn’t be the main takeaway from Saturday night’s race. The main focus should be the fact that Busch will probably not make the playoffs for a second straight season and, even worse, has seen his teammate, Austin Dillon, win twice during his nightmareish 82-race losing streak. Look, all things aside, it can literally only get better from here, but, knowing KFB’s luck as of late, Daytona could be just as rough.
Tyler Reddick is leaving Richmond in an odd spot rather than a must-win situation; he enters Daytona needing a good old-fashioned (dare we say it?) good points day to qualify for the playoffs. The No. 45 currently finds itself at war with the No. 48 team for what is presumably the final spot in the playoffs, barring some situation in which both drivers leave Daytona with no points, which, hey, that happens nowadays.
But Tyler finds himself on our list this week, not because of his situation but because fans don’t seem to notice that he is having a great third season at 23XI Racing. While it’s not as good as his 2024 regular-season championship season, it’s solid nonetheless, with a 7th-place spot in points and the eighth-best average finish in the Cup Series. Richmond was a culmination of this issue. Reddick qualified well and looked solid, but due to factors outside of his control, he couldn’t put a complete race together.
Speaking of overlooked drivers, let’s look at all three drivers at RFK Racing. In the past ten NASCAR Cup Series races, all three RFK Racing drivers have been in the top ten in average finish and points earned. Despite a miserable start to the season, Brad Keselowski is making a genuine push to compete should he win his way into the playoffs. With Ryan Preece behind the wheel, the No. 60 team scored its first pole of the season, so how did it go?
Well, Keselowski scored his fourth top ten of the past six races, and… that’s about it. Preece did not dog walk the field, and Chris Buescher tied his second-worst finish of the season. Even worse, the team looks unlikely to get multiple, or even a single car, in the 2025 playoffs with Austin Dillon’s win. Hey, the door is not shut just yet, and we get that it’s hard to expand to three cars, but this season has been a major bump in the road for the revival of this team.
Does it even count if it happens after the race?
Should this be on our list for Daytona?
Who cares? Mamba Smith may have had one of the worst NASCAR social media ratios ever, and we have got to talk about it.
If you follow the traditional, lets say, algorithm, for an online ratio, at press time, his take on the NASCAR championship format received over one thousand responses and just 316 likes, but if you like to see how many people saw it and made the conscious choice not to interact with it, and instead walk right on past it, that number shoots to a whopping 1.2 MILLION.
That is more viewers than the average Truck Series race in 2025 and more viewers than the average viewership of the four lowest-watched NASCAR Xfinity Series races this season.
Bad takes exist in the world of sports. Hey, it’s most of the business at this point, but this one takes the cake. Not only did he say “the point isn’t to crown the best driver,” which is just not how championships should work (in the opinions of many as we have learned) but he then said something that sounded straight out of a marketing pamphlet a team sends to a sponsor: “It’s to crown the best team who executed the best when the pressure was at its highest and the lights were the brightest.”
Looking beyond the facts and opinions surrounding this take, this moment is yet another example of how NASCAR is losing the culture war with its fan base.
For example, the number of fans who supported a return to a full-season championship is growing. It grew a lot in 2020 after Harvick lost the title, it grew some last fall, and now, like a virus, it grows larger every time someone with Smith’s position within the sport says something like this.
Look, it doesn’t matter what the change is; fans want change, and no amount of corporate jargon is going to change that. NASCAR needs to acknowledge this and make meaningful changes to the system before we find ourselves in this spot ten years down the road.
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