Second Thoughts: No Time to Waste Means New Crew Chief for Kyle Busch

Kyle Busch has a new crew chief. Jim Pohlman is out; Andy Street is in. No one should act surprised over the move. Yes, Pohlman joined the team after the 2025 season and lasted only 10 races. But Busch sits 27th in the Cup Series standings, and that won’t cut it for a two-time series champion. He’s also finished better than teammate Austin Dillon five times and finished worse than him five times, but Dillon sits 24th in the standings. Busch told me and other reporters Saturday that he could see some light in the tunnel, that they made an adjustment at Kansas that worked. But Pohlman was possibly just a little too fiery to be Busch’s crew chief. He aired some of his frustration on the secondary radio channel when talking to Busch’s spotter earlier this month at Bristol. “Just same [expletive] every week.” Pohlman said. FOX Sports analyst Kevin Harvick, a former Cup champion, said that type of attitude, where Pohlman questioned why Busch wasn’t running better after an adjustment, is not the way a crew chief should talk about his driver. “He can be mad at me,” Harvick said on the “Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour” podcast. “But talking like the way they talked on Channel 2 after Bristol that week, that was unacceptable. That is the wrong guy.” Now Busch has Street, the RCR performance director who appeared to do a good job as the interim crew chief for the end of 2025 with Busch when Randall Burnett announced he would move to Trackhouse Racing in 2026. It was pretty clear there would be a change in the Burnett-Busch relationship after 2025 considering the struggles that have haunted Busch the last few years. Can Street help turn it around? Is it possible he could spark enough of a turnaround that Busch and RCR continue their relationship beyond 2026? Street won 11 O’Reilly races (10 with Austin Hill) and appeared as the best in-house candidate to be Busch’s crew chief at the end of last season. But RCR brought in Pohlman, who used to work at the organization, and Street could continue in the performance director role at RCR, which is a key position in trying to build the program. So this isn’t a change from a known to an unknown. It is a change from a known (or at least as much as you could know after 10 races) to a known (or at least as much as you could know after five races). It should bring stability. [POWER RANKINGS: New Cup Winner Carson Hocevar Joins List] This appears as one last gasp to see if the team can turn it around for Busch, who will likely decide in the next couple of months whether to start talking to other teams or commit to RCR. No one would expect him to want to stay if he’s running 27th. Hopefully Pohlman gets another chance with a driver more compatible to his style. His winning an O’Reilly title with driver Justin Allgaier wasn’t a fluke. He helped Allgaier win that championship in 2024. But that didn’t mean much when working with Busch. If you are the crew chief for a two-time Cup champion and you fall out of the top 25 in points, you’re going to get replaced. Especially when it seemed like an oil-and-water relationship. That’s what happened. It makes sense. Busch is not the 27th-best driver in the NASCAR Cup Series. If he’s going to be able to show that at RCR for future seasons, the time is now to find that out. It wasn’t going to be that way with Pohlman. So RCR made a change.

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