A driver/crew chief pairing is the most important piece of the puzzle for a NASCAR team. We’ve seen some legendary driver/chief duos in the history of the sport, Chad Knaus and Jimmie Johnson along with Kevin Harvick and Rodney Childers. These are the most recent examples, but somewhere along the same time, Adam Stevens and Kyle Busch also did wonders. Rowdy’s championships (2015 & 2019) came under the guidance of Stevens, but they had a fallout after the 2020 season.
“I asked Adam for a couple changes to be made over the offseason, and he didn’t agree with my philosophy on those changes. So he said you know what, I’m going to do something different and let you do something different and we’ll see what happens.” Busch said after the split. Well, from here on the veteran crew chief would take a young and talented Christopher Bell under his wings. Whereas, the 2-time champ would struggle to find himself contending for wins and championships.
Fast forward to the 2025 season, Busch now finds himself sitting in the No. 8 RCR Chevy and Stevens and Bell are marching towards their championship dreams. Three wins in a row, no team in the Gen 7 era has been able to achieve this feat, and if they make it four in a row, Bell would level Jimmie Johnson’s record. Confidence is at an all-time high within the No. 20 JGR camp, so much so that Adam Stevens feels like he is scripting a repeat of 2018 title glory.
Christopher Bell might bring back the glory days at JGR
The sole reason why NASCAR rolled out the Next Gen race car was to close the gap between legacy teams and mid-packers. With a single source supplier for all the teams, the craft of fine-tuning race machines behind closed doors was out of the equation. Michael McDowell, Austin Cindric and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. winning the Daytona 500 was a clear win of NASCAR’s vision to level out the playing field. But, it was only a matter of time before teams cracked the code to excel with this new machine. And Adam Stevens along with his #20 team are the ones leading that charge.
Three in a row one three different style of race tracks, it feels like Bell cannot put a foot wrong with the way he’s started the 2025 campaign. And these early signs have a resemblance to Kyle Busch’s 2018 campaign, one that Stevens remembers well. “The spot that we’ve been able to get our team to, and this year is a continuation of that, feels like some of those runs that we had back in the 18-team days where, you know, one year we had, gosh, I don’t know what it was. Twenty-five or twenty-eight top fives. Yeah, twenty-two top fives I believe in 2018. We had a stretch where we won three in a row.”
Apart from seven wins from the 2018 season, the No. 18 team had five runners-up finishes. So, basically, the No. 18 Toyota Camry was in contention for a win every other weekend. If they didn’t wreck or get caught in someone else’s mess, they would finish inside the top 5 places. This is the same energy or vibe we get from the #20 team, while the three-win streak is a huge deal, Stevens and Bell were on this charge from last year itself. Between Daytona and Phoenix races in the postseason, the driver had eight top 5 finishes. But a lack of victory forced him to pull a hail-melon 2.0 and ultimately he couldn’t make it to the championship race.
Stevens’ believe that their fate is entirely in their hands, much like it was in 2018, is justified by the team’s current performance and Bell’s continuous improvement. The onus is on them to keep doing their job correctly, it starts right from the shop, the engineering team, the strategy calls and the final execution by the driver on the race day.
“It just feels like that, where we know… If we do our jobs individually, all of us, that’s in the shop, that is my mechanics and engineers, my driver, my over-the-wall crew, and most importantly, myself, and then we execute as a team together at the racetrack, that it’s only up to us and our decision-making of how good we can be because we have the equipment, we have the talent behind the wheel, we have all the pieces of the puzzle that we need to go compete, and it feels a lot like that 2018 season.” Stevens said.
As Stevens pushes Bell toward what could be a career-defining season, Busch on the other hand faces an uphill climb. The 2025 season is huge for the RCR driver and could be a turning point in his NASCAR legacy.
Kyle Busch’s Uphill Battle to Stay Relevant
For 19 straight years, Busch won at least one Cup Series race. That streak ended in 2024, marking one of the most difficult seasons of his career. His 18.3 average finish was his worst since his rookie year in 2005, raising doubts about whether he still has what it takes to win at NASCAR’s highest level.
Richard Childress Racing (RCR) has responded by making bold changes. It started with the departure of Andy Petree from the role of competition director and Keith Roden assumed the position. Soon Roden was bumped up to the role of vice president of competition. Meanwhile, John Klausmeier joined RCR as the new technical director. So, a major overhaul of the leadership role is in place within the organization with the hopes of turning a corner for good on the racetrack.
NASCAR insiders are divided on whether Busch can return to his winning ways. On a recent episode of Performance Racing Network, a group of experts debated whether Rowdy could win a race before the Coca-Cola 600. Kyle Petty, an eight-time Cup Series winner, didn’t hold back: “Black flag, I’m sorry. I don’t think so, but then again, I’ve been wrong before. I’m just giving it a black flag… I got no reason.”
Petty doubled down on his views stating that Kyle Busch belongs in the elite drivers group and RCR shouldn’t be aiming for a playoff spot. “Just to win a race to get in the playoffs, that’s ho-hum for Kyle Busch. There’s an elite group that Kyle Busch belongs to that say, Yeah I want to be in the playoffs but I wanna have a shot at winning the playoffs and that’s more important than even getting to the playoffs.”
Well, Rowdy Busch came oh so close to winning the first race of the season at COTA. But it was Bell who got the better of him under the crew chief that Busch didn’t get along despite championship success. So, there are two storylines we need to follow for the rest of the season, and hopefully,y we don’t see a repeat of 2024 for Busch and the RCR team.
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