NASCAR: Richard Childress says Kyle Busch was set to return to his team for the 2027 Cup Series season

NASCAR team owner Richard Childress revealed that he was set to announce on Saturday that Kyle Busch would be back for a fifth season with the team.

>Instead, Childress was at Michigan International Speedway making his first public comments after Busch’s sudden death on May 21 at the age of 41.

>“The hardest part of this is that today, we were going to be in here, Kyle was going to be with me and we were going to announce that he was coming back in 2027 and drive for [Richard Childress Racing],” Childress said. “We wanted to do it up here in Michigan with our [General Motors] friends, with Chevrolet, and it didn’t happen. This is a different type of media availability instead of a press conference that he was coming back to race for us in 2027.

>“I talked to Kyle Tuesday night [May 19], before everything went down Wednesday night and Thursday, and we had a great conversation. He said ‘you give me cars like you gave me the last three weeks and I will make the Chase this year.’ We were that confident. Both of us had a lot of confidence in this team.”

>Busch died after he contracted sepsis while he had bacterial pneumonia. His death certificate said that Busch had been dealing with the pneumonia for days to weeks. The two-time Cup Series champion said he was dealing with a cough in his final NASCAR Cup Series points race at Watkins Glen on May 10. On May 20, his family said that he’d been hospitalized with a severe illness and would miss the Coca-Cola 600.

>Released 911 audio revealed that the unidentified man who called 911 from the General Motors Technical Center that Wednesday said that Busch was coughing up blood and had shortness of breath.

>Busch joined RCR ahead of the 2023 season following 15 seasons at Joe Gibbs Racing. He won three times over his first 15 Cup starts at RCR but hadn’t made victory lane since as the team struggled to keep up. Busch was 14th in the 2023 points standings — his lowest finish since his rookie season in 2005 — and finished 20th and 21st the past two seasons.

>

>He posted his first two top-10 finishes of the season across his final three Cup Series races in 2026 and had moved up four spots in the standings to 23rd.

>“Kyle Busch will go down in history as one of the greatest drivers there’s ever been,” Childress said. He’ll be in the Hall of Fame. I’d love to see them put him in right away. He helped RCR when we needed him.”

>In 2001, Dale Earnhardt was the most recent Cup Series driver to die during a race when his Richard Childress Racing car went head-on into the wall on the final lap of the Daytona 500. And now, 25 years later, Childress is again dealing with the sudden passing of one of his drivers.

>“It’s challenging,” Childress said. “You lose two of the greatest drivers that’s ever driven a car in NASCAR, and now having to go through it again. I just feel so bad for the family and the RCR employees. I haven’t slept very well. I’ll leave it at that.”

>