One-on-one with Kyle Busch’s crew chief Randall Burnett

Randall Burnett doesn’t think about his string of success until someone points it out.

And why not ask him about being one of the winningest crew chiefs in the NASCAR Cup Series over the last 59 races? Burnett of Richard Childress Racing’s No. 8 team is tied with Rudy Fugle of Hendrick Motorsports for the most wins by a crew chief in the series since the start of the 2022 season.

Burnett guided Tyler Reddick to three victories last season, including on the Indianapolis road course where the series returns Sunday (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC). Three more victories have been added with Kyle Busch.

“It's cool,” Burnett said. “I’m really fortunate and really blessed to be with such a great group of people and to have some success from them.”

The pairing of Burnett and Busch got off to a fast start with a win in Fontana, the second points race of the season. As the regular season winds down, Burnett’s team has solidified its position in the postseason but believes there is still a lot of room for improvement.

“We don’t have the consistency on a weekly basis that I think we need to be a championship team right now,” Burnett said. “We’re working on that, discussing how to do things better to be a little more consistent and working to get our short track package better. Then we’ve got to clean up some execution things and make less mistakes. Make our days less eventful at times. I feel like we’ve had a lot of really good speed at a lot of places but we’ve kind of put ourselves behind the eight ball.

“In the playoffs, you have to be consistent, you have to be able to score stage points, and you have to be able to compete for wins. And we do that but probably not consistently enough at this point.”

Burnett got his first opportunity as a Cup Series crew chief in 2016 with AJ Allmendinger at JTG Daugherty Racing. It was one year and done for Burnett before he moved to Richard Childress Racing where he oversaw Matt Tifft’s program in the Xfinity Series in 2018 and then won a championship in the series with Reddick in 2019.

Childress moved Burnett and Reddick to the Cup Series together in 2020. It makes this the second stint Burnett has had at the Cup Series level, which is proving to be his most successful.

RB: Starting on the Cup side with AJ [Allmendinger], I had a lot of hurdles to overcome, a lot of things to learn. I’d been a race engineer for a long time and definitely switching into the crew chief role, it presents its own challenges. It's more than just when to pit or what springs you want to run in the car. There's a lot of stuff that goes into it on a weekly basis, and I had to learn my footing on that. So going back to the Xfinity Series for a few years -- I'd always been on the Cup side so I really didn't know much about an Xfinity car when I went to crew chief one. Fortunately, I had some really good people on me when I first got to working on the Xfinity car. We worked through some things and I think it was a good growing experience for myself to go through some of that on Xfinity side, and then to get the chance to do the Cup side in the right circumstance.

RB: Just the little things that go a long way, the details that you have to pay attention to. Everybody in this garage is really good and really experienced and they deserve to be in this garage. The competition's tight. It's tough. We've got a great team that we've been building over the past couple of years, and everybody's all in; everybody's bought in and pulls the rope in the right direction and does their part. Nobody ever slacks off and it makes my job easier when it goes that way. I respect all these guys on this team. They're all a bunch of racers. They all grew up racing. Everybody's got the same mentality as me -- if we don't win, they're mad about it and they want to figure out why and they want to work harder to figure out why.

Burnett says it's the little details that have helped RCR's No. 8 crew grow into regular contenders, but feels the team still has a way to go with race-to-race consistency. Nigel Kinrade/Motorsport Images

RB: It's a seven-day-a-week battle. You get there Monday and you’ve got to grind out, get through all your reports and all your debriefs and go over everything that you learned that weekend and try to see what you can take out of it and apply it to the next weekend. The guys that do that and do it regularly are the ones that excel their teams and get their teams better, and are the ones that are battling for championship at the end of the year.

RB: The first part of it is getting to know each other, just the nuances of each other how we communicate, how we talk about things. Just learning the little details of when he talks about a car, how loose or tight it is in the race, how big of an adjustment he needs depending on his description of it is. When you are with somebody for a long time, you learn those things, and you know what those things are. So when you have a different driver, a new driver, you kind of have to learn those things over.

Fortunately for us, I feel like that transition went pretty well. Kyle drives his car different from say Tyler did last year, so as far as transferring a lot of the setups over, we're obviously constantly learning about this car so it's always evolving, and there are different driving styles. It doesn't necessarily make it as easy to just plug and play setups that we had success with last year. There's been a little bit of that a little bit of some challenges to overcome with that. But overall, I think our transition went pretty well. I feel like we've worked long enough together now -- it's only been half a half season or whatever, but I feel like it went well, and that we're getting to know each other a little better and know the things that we need to work on.

RB: Well, certainly it's more fun that way. We've had a lot of talented drivers the past couple of years. Tyler's an incredible talent and we hated to see him go, but obviously, we got one of the best ever to do it in our car right now. So, we all feel the pressure of that, knowing that we'd better win some races, and we're doing everything we can with Kyle's help He's been great for RCR and brought some good ideas in and some things that we've adapted and I feel like it's helped us.

RB: I think (it’s special). Richard has done so much for the sport in general and he deserves to be on top and obviously went through long years of slumps, just not performing at the level that any of us had hoped. So to be able to help guide that back toward where it should be has been great. There are a lot of people behind the scenes that make that happen and I just get to be a small part of it.