With Kyle Busch off to the worst start of his career, Richard Childress Racing is making a crew chief change, naming Andy Street to lead the team for the two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion.
Street replaces Jim Pohlman, effective immediately, and will remain atop the pit box for the remainder of the season, RCR announced Monday morning. Pohlman will remain with RCR in a position in its competition department.
The move comes 10 races into the season and with Busch having posted just a single finish inside the top 10 — a 10th-place result Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway. This marked the longest stretch of races Busch, in his 22nd year, had gone to start a season without recording a top-10 finish.
Pohlman was in his first year leading Busch’s No. 8 team, with RCR hiring him to turn around the fortunes of the team after Busch failed to win a race and missed the playoffs each of the past two years. But the transition from NASCAR’s second-tier O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, where Pohlman had served as a crew chief for JR Motorsports, proved to be a frustrating challenge.
Andy Street filled in as Kyle Busch’s interim crew chief for five races last season. (David Jensen / Getty Images)
Busch ranks 27th in the points standings after Sunday’s race, 66 behind the last transfer spot into NASCAR’s playoffs with 16 regular-season races remaining.
This is an unfamiliar position for Busch, who ranks ninth on NASCAR’s all-time wins list. The driver, who turns 41 on Saturday, has not won a race since June 2023, a career-worst 103-race stretch. The recent downturn in performance has led to questions about whether his abilities have slipped.
“Kyle Busch, I can’t hold the guy’s helmet talent-wise,” fellow driver Denny Hamlin said on a recent episode of his podcast, “Actions Detrimental.” “But this is not new. He’s struggled for five years now. We have to be honest about our expectations.
“If you’re expecting Kyle Busch to go just back to victory lane on a regular basis, you are kidding yourselves, and you’re going to be very disappointed.”
Busch took exception to the comments made by Hamlin, a teammate of his at Joe Gibbs Racing from 2008 to 2022.
“People don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, and in this instance, I don’t feel like Denny Hamlin even knows what the hell he’s talking about,” Busch said earlier this month. “So he can bash me all he wants — and I can certainly make his life hell.”
Busch left JGR to join RCR in 2023 after he and JGR could not agree on a contract extension. In his first season at RCR, Busch won three races and climbed as high as third in the points standings. But since then, his results have dipped, and this past offseason, RCR named Pohlman his crew chief. He replaced Randall Burnett, who had primarily been Busch’s crew chief for the entirety of his tenure at RCR.
Street, who has worked in various roles at RCR, served as Busch’s interim crew chief in five races last season. The duo recorded two top-10 finishes, with a best result of fifth.
“We strongly believe in the people we have,” RCR president Mike Verlander said in a statement on Monday. “At the same time, we expect better results, and that requires us to continually evaluate and make adjustments. Jim has more than two decades of success in this sport and will remain an important part of our team. We believe Andy and Kyle’s previous working relationship positions us to improve the No. 8 team and compete at a higher level.”
