For fans of auto racing, the Memorial Day weekend usually brings feelings resembling Christmas. On Sunday, the largest single-day sporting event in the world, the Indianapolis 500, will precede NASCAR’s longest race, the Coca-Cola 600.
But this year, fans watching both races may do so through tears. Kyle Busch, a two-time champion of NASCAR’s premier Cup Series, died on Thursday at the age of just 41 following an undisclosed illness.
The announcement shocked the motorsports community with its suddenness. Busch had just won a NASCAR Truck Series race at Dover Motor Speedway less than a week earlier. For such a giant of the sport to die while still a major motorsports presence (albeit not in a racing incident) brings echoes of Dale Earnhardt’s death a quarter-century ago.
Record-Setting Competitor
Kyle Busch’s career brought to mind the old question about what motivates people more — do they love to win, or do they hate to lose? Kyle Busch certainly won a lot. He won two Cup championships in 2015 and 2019. To win his first title in 2015, he came back after missing the first 11 races of the 36-race season after breaking a leg and a foot in a crash before the Daytona 500. Coming back from injuries that severe to win a championship? That’s a competitor.
Busch won more races (234) across NASCAR’s three national divisions than any other driver. He holds the career race win record in both the truck series (69) and the top developmental series (102), along with 63 wins in NASCAR’s premier Cup series. He also won at least one Cup series race in a record 19 straight seasons, breaking the mark of 18 set by “King” Richard Petty. And for several years, he also owned a truck series team, a role that allowed him to mentor and develop the next generation of stock car racers.
Busch broke these records despite NASCAR literally changing its rulebook in ways that disadvantaged him. A prodigious racer while still in high school, Busch had to step away from his ride temporarily when the series imposed a minimum age of 18 to race in its three national series. Later in his career, NASCAR limited the extent to which Cup series drivers could compete in the two other national series, in part because Busch would so frequently enter — and dominate — those races.
Feisty Spirit
That same competitive fire made Busch a NASCAR personality; love him or hate him, you certainly couldn’t ignore him — or lack an opinion about him. Busch had opinions about motorsports: After winning the first race in NASCAR’s fifth-generation car in 2007, he said in Victory Lane that “I’m still not a very big fan of these things [i.e., the car]. I can’t stand to drive them — they suck.” And other people had opinions about him: In 2010, Brad Keselowski introduced himself to the fans at a race with the following five words: “Kyle Busch is an @$$.”
Brash and outspoken, Busch never lacked an opinion or an ability to express it, with last month providing a prime example. When former teammate Denny Hamlin questioned whether Busch can make speed in the style of Cup cars first debuted in 2022, Busch shot back: “If Denny wants to switch cars, I’ll switch cars with him. Any day of the week, any time. I’d love for him to show me that he can carry it better than I can. … I don’t feel like Denny Hamlin even knows what the hell he’s talking about. So he can bash me all he wants. I can certainly make his life hell.”
Family Legacy
In recent years, Busch had matured, if not always mellowed, by becoming a husband and father. He and his wife Samantha had been brutally honest with the public about their struggles to conceive; together, they founded a charity, the Bundle of Joy Fund, designed to support families seeking access to in vitro fertilization.
Eventually, Busch had two children — son Brexton and daughter Lennix. At 11, Brexton has developed his father’s love of motorsports, with the two racing against each other for the first time last March. Competitor that he was, the elder Busch couldn’t help but note that his higher finish meant that he had “bragging rights” over his son, at least “for the next couple of weeks.”
As much as Busch loved to compete, he had more down days than up ones at NASCAR’s highest level in recent years. While he won three times in his first season with Richard Childress Racing in 2023, he had gone almost three years without winning a Cup Series race — the longest dry spell in his career. Chalk it up to bad equipment, bad chemistry with his new team, bad luck, or a combination of all three: The results hadn’t been there, and the frustration showed.
But the talent was always there. Busch proved that last Friday in Dover. His words after that win now seem eerily prescient: “You never know when the last one [win] is going to be, so cherish them all — trust me.” So too our memories of this great racer. Requiescat in pace.
