Two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch won’t be featured in the second season of Full Speed, the Netflix docuseries chronicling the sport’s drivers and teams in a fashion similar to Formula One’s Drive to Survive.
“No, they didn’t ask me,” Busch said in an interview with Front Office Sports. “Maybe it comes down to that you must be in the playoffs to be on video.”
This year, Busch is winless and out of the running for another Cup Series championship (which he won in 2015 and 2019), but still hopeful he can keep his 19-year streak of at least one race win alive.
“I don’t know, but I think my story of the 20-year thing would be a pretty good one,” he said. “But they’re not following along, so you won’t see much of me.”
Full Speed’s five-episode Season 1 followed roughly half of the drivers that competed in the 10-race playoffs in 2023, but not Busch, 39, who advanced to the round of 12 in the playoffs last year after winning three times during the regular season. In February, Busch joked about his Netflix snub while many of his fans voiced their frustration.
NASCAR and Netflix have confirmed that Season 2 of Full Speed is in production.
As Busch looks for a late-season win, he’s paying attention to the ongoing drama surrounding NASCAR’s charter agreement with team owners. Michael Jordan’s 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports filed a joint antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR after being the only two teams not to sign the charter agreements, which are the sport’s version of franchises.
“NASCAR is a great family sport, and we have these opportunities of supporting one another at a lot of times and through a lot of good and a lot of bad,” Busch said. “But as most families do, sometimes they fight.”
Busch agrees teams should receive a larger portion of revenue—particularly from TV money—similar to how other top U.S. leagues operate. “Other sports are healthy,” he said. “They’re a lot healthier than ours.”
“I was sort of the catalyst to this process of what’s going on in the charter agreements,” Busch explained. “When I was with Joe Gibbs Racing, we lost our main sponsor M&M’s as they pulled out of the sport, and I was left without a job because we couldn’t find a replacement sponsor.”
In the end, Busch, who now races for Richard Childress Racing, feels there should be more ways for teams to bring in revenue and stay afloat: “I think the owners should have an easier time of being able to have that sustainability in our sport.”
