DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. Kyle Busch will make his 20^th Daytona 500 start on Sunday at Daytona Intl Speedway. The two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion continues to chase his first victory in the Great American Race.

Seven-time series champion Dale Earnhardt famously won the 500 in his 20^th start in 1998.

Youd certainly like to hope so. Twenty years of trying. There was another storied racer of the past that won on his 20th try and that was a pretty big deal, Busch said of Earnhardt. He was a former RCR driver as well so itd certainly be nice to win that race and do it with RCR in the No. 8 Zone Chevrolet. So that would be pretty cool.

Busch has been strong at Daytona since he joined RCR in 2023.

Weve had really good speed being down here. These guys build great restrictor-plate program racecars, so when we go to Daytona, Atlanta, Talladega, we feel like those places are really good for us, Busch said. Weve got really good speed. I just told someone that its 80 percent luck/20 percent skill race. Others would disagree but I feel like you have to have a lot of things go your way and you have to have the stars align. Being able to lead off the final pit stop is certainly going to put yourself in a really good position.

Crew chiefs for two NASCAR Cup Series teams were ejected Wednesday for improper weight violations on their respective race cars.

Chris Lawson, crew chief for Todd Gilliland and Front Row Motorsports and Billy Plourde, crew chief for Cody Wares Rick Ware Racing Ford, will sit out the remainder of the weekend.

Engineer Kevyn Robolledo replaces Lawson, while RWR competition director Tommy Baldwin sits in for Plourde.

Three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Joey Logano says racing at Daytona has changed a lot since he won the race in 2015.

In every way. Its changed in so many ways. The cars. The drivers are completely different, Logano explained. I said it earlier, you can put these drivers and crew chiefs and teams in the 2015 Daytona 500 and that race would look completely different. With the same cars it would look completely different, just because thats how people grow. Its the evolution. People keep getting smarter and doing things in different ways and because of that it changes, and then you have the difference of what the Next Gen car is compared to then. Its another huge change.

Tyler Reddick returns to Daytona on the heels of the best season of his career with 23XI Racing.

It was a good year. We did a lot of things right in the summer, Reddick recalled. We had to overcome a lot of incidents, a lot of blockades if you will that couldve kept us from advancing and couldve kept us from getting to Phoenix with a chance to compete.

We did a good job of overcoming that each step of the way and it was a pretty rocky road that we had to take in the Playoffs. To be able to overcome that was good especially when you look at how everything just kind of fell our way in the regular season. When things finally didnt go our way, we didnt fold up, we welcomed the pressure. It was a really good year for me as a driver. We won a number of races, we let some get away for sure. The wins were great, but I think the days outside of the wins were more of what made that season be as great as it was. Just the consistency we showed over long periods of the season.

Corey LaJoie is running a limited schedule with Rick Ware Racing in the Cup Series this season. Still, he thinks he has a chance to contend at Daytona, where he will drive a third entry for the team if he qualifies through Thursday nights Duels at Daytona.

Experience certainly helps. This is my ninth Daytona 500, LaJoie explained. Ive ran all of the Next Gen speedway races, so I think that will probably help me in the Thursday night race more so than qualifying. I feel like you can get in my car and drive it as fast as I can here tonight, but its the details.

Its how much fuel you can save and retain a bit of the track position, have a good pit road entry, have clean pit road in and out and then blend and try to get up to speed and you get your group to blend as close to the front as possible and thats where the money is made. The devil is in the details and hopefully we can stack enough pennies on Thursday night to put ourselves in a position to make it.

Riley Herbst is racing for rookie-of-the-year honors with 23XI Racing. After several seasons competing in the Xfinity Series, hes learned how to run NASCAR races.

The biggest thing I learned was how to run these NASCAR races properly, he said during media day. I know that is kind of a wordy answer, but it is just about taking a step back. There has been immense people that have helped me. One is them is Kevin Harvick. He really set me down helped me understand the process of running a race, from the green flag to the checkered flag and I feel like that is the biggest thing over four years is just the ability to run the whole race and race flow.