![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_KyBusch_HMS_112315.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\u201cBecause you never know when the last one is.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was double NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch after winning a Truck race at Dover last week, and it was a prophetic statement that marked his last ever NASCAR win before his tragic passing on Thursday, May 21, aged 41.<\/p>\n
Busch\u2019s entrance onto the NASCAR scene coincided with my most attentive NASCAR-watching spell. In that\u00a0mid-late-2000s\u00a0period, Jeff Gordon\u2019s clean cut, corporate America image had created a new breed of NASCAR\u00a0driver that\u00a0didn\u2019t need to be a villain\u00a0or to\u00a0piss everyone off to sell merch and get bums\u00a0on\u00a0seats.<\/p>\n
Sure, there were fights, rivalries, maybe even a bit of pantomime. But anything of that sort often felt quite unnatural. Corporate America almost always ensured there was an apology, a handshake or at least a de-escalation.<\/p>\n
Then Kyle Busch came along.<\/p>\n
He wasn\u2019t the first antagonistic NASCAR driver. But he was the first for a while who genuinely didn\u2019t mind what anyone thought of him, left everything out on the\u00a0race track\u00a0and didn\u2019t care for the consequences.<\/p>\n
Despite his obvious speed,\u00a0Busch was let go by Hendrick Motorsports so it could\u00a0create a ‘super team’ with Jeff Gordon, Jimmie\u00a0Johnson and newly-signed for 2008, Dale Earnhardt Jr,\u00a0the most popular driver in the championship by a mile or 10.<\/p>\n
During 2008, Busch blatantly spun Earnhardt out\u00a0while fighting for the lead at\u00a0Richmond and\u00a0needed security to exit the track where thousands of angry fans threw beer cans at Busch while the race was still happening. Busch didn’t care!<\/p>\n
Even though\u00a0at this point\u00a0Busch was in direct competition with my favourite driver Gordon and the Hendrick team Gordon co-owned,\u00a0I couldn\u2019t help looking for Busch every week. He just cut through the bull.<\/p>\n
Many drivers before and after him have been antagonistic because it attracts fans, keeps them relevant, gets people talking about them and sells merchandise for their sponsors or themselves. You could even argue that this bluster was a coping mechanism for not being as talented as the top drivers in the series, or at\u00a0least\u00a0being able to beat them consistently.<\/p>\n
Kyle was as good as any driver on that grid in a car and was antagonistic because that\u2019s who he was. And motorsport has an amazing way of showing who someone truly is.<\/p>\n
Even now, after his passing, floods of tributes are pouring in from people he would have fought at various times given the opportunity. And they definitely would have fought him!<\/p>\n
\u201cTonight I feel like a coyote with no more roadrunner to chase,\u201d said Brad Keselowski. Even Earnhardt Jr wrote a long post about how they\u2019d reconciled recently – initiated by Busch – and laughed at the prospect of Busch driving for Earnhardt later this year.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s not enough space here to analyse every season, result, win, career move, title and fight. But I wanted to convey that Busch was a genuine racer who existed in a championship where\u00a0you\u00a0might think theatrics and disingenuous portrayals of a personality are part of the game.<\/p>\n
But that wasn\u2019t Busch. He was his nickname, Rowdy, through and through.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In recent years he\u2019d done so much to help the aspirations of Brexton, his son, in racing, and Brexton became a regular feature in victory lane at races. Samantha, his wife, has always been super-involved in Busch\u2019s career and visible to NASCAR fans too, especially through a big social media presence.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t imagine their grief and sorrow but hope the many dedications of time and effort to properly praise and remember Kyle are a source of sympathy at this difficult time.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll leave you with this. One of my favourite Busch moments was in 2018 at Chicago when Busch and Kyle Larson banged wheels to the finish. Larson clipped Busch and almost spun him, and then shortly after Busch just drove Larson into the wall and won the race solo.<\/p>\n
Larson was so impressed with Busch he held a thumb out of the window while driving past after the race. He’d been taken out, but I think that thumb was Larson acknowledging he’d been one-upped by a better driver, at least on the day.<\/p>\n
Busch proceeded to walk to the cameras and do a really enthusiastic crybaby gesture, to his \u2018haters\u2019,\u00a0 and anyone who didn\u2019t like how he\u2019d won the race.<\/p>\n
Classic Kyle Busch. There’s 50 stories just like that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cBecause you never know when the last one is.\u201d That was double NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":686077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-686076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/686077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}