The first time I saw Kyle Busch, he wasn’t saying a word.
He was sitting on the floor of a crowded press box at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, looking up at NASCAR veterans Tony Stewart and Ken Schrader as they swapped racing stories.
Busch was still a teenager then. His cheeks were rosy, devoid of stubble. There was an innocence about him, belying the hard edge that was to come.
A couple of days later, he would make his Cup Series debut on his hometown track.
He never joined the conversation. He just smiled and listened.
Looking back now, I wonder if he was imagining the day when he would have stories of his own to tell.
First family of speed
My initial exposure to the Busch family was through their father, Tom, a stringbean of a man who was tearing up the LVMS Bullring years before the property that surrounded it was transformed into one of the premier motorsports facilities in America.
Around that time, a young charger named Chris Trickle — the nephew of NASCAR veteran Dick Trickle — was the one on the fast track to the big time.
When Chris Trickle became the victim of a drive-by shooting that ultimately took his life, it was Kurt Busch — Kyle’s older brother — who inherited Chris Trickle’s ride and sponsor, Star Nursery of Las Vegas.
Kurt Busch won his first Cup Series race at Dover, Delaware, in 2002. Two years after that, he was crowned NASCAR champion, highlighting a Hall of Fame career that saw him win 34 races including the 2017 Daytona 500.
By the time Kyle Busch burst onto the scene, Kurt was the one making enemies on and sometimes off the track. But he eventually would turn jeers into cheers as he matured into one of his sport’s biggest ambassadors.
When Kyle Busch died at the age of 41 on May 21 from bacterial pneumonia that progressed into sepsis, he was still working on reinventing himself. But it wasn’t such a priority any more. Racing fans began to appreciate his candor and take-no-prisoners style, rather than demand he be held accountable for it.
His fanbase continued to grow as the two-time Cup Series champion and winner of 63 races in NASCAR’s premier division assumed his place among the legends of the sport.
Despite not winning a Cup Series race since 2023, Busch ranked third in NASCAR driver merchandise sales.
No place like home
Las Vegas has produced champions in almost every corner of the sporting world, but few remained as closely connected to their hometown as Kyle Busch.
Long after the victories, the championships and the animated discussions with other drivers on pit road, Busch never stopped talking about the people and places that helped launch his remarkable career.
He remembered the mechanics, sponsors, teachers and Saturday night racers who gave him a chance before the word “polarizing” practically became his middle name.
Now, as Las Vegas continues to mourn one of its most celebrated sports icons, those memories carry a different weight. They tell the story not just of a racing legend, but of a hometown kid who never completely left home.
After he won his second Cup Series title in 2019, Busch thanked many of the people in Las Vegas who had supported him long before he unveiled his trademark victory bow, an homage to his hometown in the desert.
“For sure Jerry Spilsbury,” Busch said of the Bullring veteran who gave him his first ride in a late-model stock car. “The first time out, I wrecked it. Not the way I wanted to start out.”
“Dick Cobb, Donnie Williams, Mark Allison — I still see him every once in a while, he was the old Swensen’s Ice Cream guy. Those are the guys I remember who gave me the itch to be a race car driver,” Busch said.
And you didn’t have to be good with a monkey wrench to receive a shout-out.
Once at the track, I asked Busch about his alma mater Durango High winning the boys basketball state championship.
“Durango won? Oh, cool. Right on. That’s awesome,” he said.
“I was there for a lot of championships with Al La Rocque (father of Lady Rebels coach and former Durango star Lindy La Rocque) being the coach. He was my first-period computer teacher, and I think I slept through about 80 percent of his classes.”
World’s fastest wedding crasher
But if there’s one thing Kyle Busch enjoyed more than his hometown, winning races and mixing it up with his racing rivals, it was his fans.
He loved to drop in at a campground to visit with them, roll up to them in postrace traffic to autograph a cap or T-shirt bearing his car number or likeness and pose for selfies with them.
One year during NASCAR Champion’s Week at Wynn Las Vegas, he sidled up to a young lady who was wearing one of his M&M’s racing jackets, tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she wouldn’t mind posing for a selfie.
In 2018, two card-carrying members of Rowdy Nation, as his unofficial fan club came to be known, were married during a ceremony at a local chapel, their vows coinciding with one of Busch’s frequent media appearances.
The bride was blushing, the groom appeared bemused with eyes glazed over, the best man wore a bowling shirt that said “Lucky’s Speed Shop” on the back.
The official witness was Kyle Busch. He said these were actually the second nuptials featuring total strangers that he had witnessed in his hometown.
He shared a story about heading to victory lane after winning the pole position for the 2009 Shelby 427, only to find it already occupied.
“There was a couple getting married there. I had to wait for them to be done, so we could take the photos,” Busch recalled about treating the newlyweds to fun-sized packs of M&Ms that turned victory lane into a chocolate-covered mess.
Another side of Kyle
That was glib Kyle at his best. But he also could be insightful Kyle, or introspective Kyle, when the situation called for it.
I’ll never forget a conversation we had one night during the COVID pandemic when NASCAR was racing on multiple nights of the week in front of empty grandstands.
He spoke of how strange it was not to have fans at the track, including his two biggest ones, wife Samantha and son Brexton. And how driving in seven races in 11 or 12 days wasn’t such a big deal — not when Richard Petty and David Pearson drove in 61 and Ned Jarrett in 59 in a single season.
Busch said he could relate to those guys. He suggested that perhaps his problem wasn’t his fierce competitive nature, hair-trigger temper or an unprincipled social media, but being born too late.
“I’ve always said I missed the boat, because the way I go about things, do things, say things, was probably more fit for (another era),” he said alluding to his heat-of-the-moment reactions when paint is swapped and middle fingers are extended over perceived indiscretions.
This was a couple of days after Chase Elliott had shown him an extended middle finger during another fanless race at Darlington Raceway after the two had tangled.
Busch’s tone harkened to a soul-searching chat in 2017 during which he acknowledged his anger management issues.
“Different people show their emotions in different ways. Unfortunately for me, mine has never been very gracious — and I don’t know that it ever will be,” said the man who once went six months without talking to his brother after he and Kurt collided during the 2017 all-star race.
“I’m sorry, that’s just who I am. I mean, I can probably get better and go to training classes and everything else, but I don’t know. It is the way it is.”
That night in Charlotte was the only time I can remember Kyle Busch calling me by my first name.
It wasn’t meant to be
While researching this story, I came across a piece I had written summarizing the previous decade on the local auto racing scene. It alluded to a potential rivalry between Busch and Elliott that pretty much died on the vine that night in Charlotte.
The headline accompanying the Jan. 1, 2020, piece read: “Kyle Busch becomes driving force during decade of uncertainty.” It began with my vision of what a similar story might look like 10 years down the road:
LAS VEGAS — Kyle Busch passed Chase Elliott on the last lap to earn a thrilling victory in the 2029 NASCAR championship race Sunday on his hometown track. It was the Las Vegan’s seventh series title, tying him with Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt Sr. and Jimmie Johnson, and cemented the 44-year-old’s reputation as one of stock car racing’s greatest all-time drivers …
“I would like to think that any time you’re able to win more races and more championships that it helps your stature and helps you become — I don’t know what it helps you become — more successful, I guess,” said Busch, who was coming off his second Cup Series championship.
“I would love to be sitting here talking about eight (championships). I’ve been in the sport for 14, 15 years, whatever this season is for me, and so we’re only talking about two. It’s nice to have success, take it when you get it, but there’s certainly a few missed opportunities for sure.”
I wrote that although auto racing’s whimsical and often volatile nature makes it nearly impossible to predict its future, it stood to reason that Kyle Busch would still be a big part of it in 10 years.
But now that fate has intervened in a way that not even the fickle gods of auto racing could have imagined, that’s one prediction that won’t be coming true.
Passing the torch
The last story I wrote about Kyle Busch was in October 2023. It had been almost a year to the day since big brother Kurt held back tears in announcing his retirement at LVMS after crashing and suffering a serious head injury.
“When I saw some of my paint scheme renderings for the new year, they didn’t have my first name on them anymore, just my last name,” “Ky” Busch said about the absence of “Ku” Busch, which is how the brothers had been identified in TV graphics since they started racing together.
Kyle Busch spoke of the day when B. Busch — son Brexton, who despite only recently turning 11 already has built an impressive racing résumé — would be old enough to start swapping NASCAR paint.
In a perfect world, Kyle Busch said he would retire from the Cup Series to share a Truck Series ride with Brexton when his progeny turned 15.
“He could run the short track races, and I could run the bigger tracks,” Papa Kyle said in addressing a NASCAR rule that prohibits young drivers from competing on super speedways before their 18th birthday.
“That’s the dream, and I’ve got to make the dream a reality. I gotta have that life-after-racing plan, and I don’t have one set yet. But if my Cup career is going to end in the next six or seven years, time is ticking.”
But now that the perfect world he imagined has stopped turning, that’s another dream that won’t be playing out the way Kyle Busch had hoped.
