Selflessness. Humility. Truthfulness. These are the three marks of an honorable man. – Suzy Kassem
Greg Biffle‘s death Thursday (Dec. 19), along with his wife, daughter, son and three others after a plane crash near the Statesville, N.C. airport, has turned the holidays into heartbreak for everyone connected to stock car racing.
Just 55 years old, Biffle was on the precipice of perhaps an induction to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, still moonlighting in the sport and helping friend Cleetus McFarland learn the ropes of stock car racing. It was McFarland (Garrett Mitchell) who Biffle, his family, Craig Wadsworth, Dennis Dutton and Jack Dutton were flying to visit before something went catastrophically wrong in that airplane.
The many accomplishments of Biffle the man have already been well documented (see Tanner Marlar’s Frontstretch article for more). But the sadness everyone feels in and around NASCAR? That’s shown no signs of stopping, present in every phone call, text and email about this tragedy I’ve had the past 36 hours. It feels like the sport has been hit with an anvil just a week after the ending of a contentious trial injected hope for the future.
Why is this death hitting harder for so many? Three reasons come to mind.
Greg Biffle Was Finally Getting His Due
In the first few years I started covering NASCAR full-time, in 2006, I had a friend in the Philadelphia suburbs who was a Greg Biffle fan. He’d go to the Dover Motor Speedway races every year, wearing his No. 16 gear and joking about how lonely he was in the stands.
It had nothing to do with Biffle the wheelman. Just a year earlier, he’d finished runner-up to Tony Stewart in the Cup championship while winning a career-high six races. Biffle finished in the top five in points two more times (2008, 2012) while racking up more than 5,800 laps led during his career driving for Jack Roush.
But Biffle in those days was often overshadowed by other drivers within his own team. Carl Edwards had charisma, a 20-something media darling who jumped into a Roush car and became an instant title contender. Mark Martin brought the veteran nostalgia, Roush’s original driver without whom Biffle wouldn’t have had a chance at a Cup ride.
Even Biffle’s close friend, Matt Kenseth, was a championship winner who had multiple Daytona 500 trophies on the shelf. He had a sly, sarcastic sense of humor in contrast to Biffle’s dependable, thoughtful quotes.
Sometimes the guy whose best attribute is just showing up for you, in good times and bad, doesn’t get appreciated until after the moment has passed.
That’s what it seemed like for Biffle, loyal to the end with Roush (aside from a few comeback races in 2022, 510 of his 515 starts were with one single organization). Biffle stayed when the going got tough, the big guns bailed, and he was left to carry the load. But he never complained or got chippy with the media; Biffle just simply fought harder.
Now, a decade-plus removed from Roush’s heyday, you can see how well Biffle’s stats held up. His 19 wins are two more than Jeff Burton achieved at Roush and five more than another Roush Cup champion, Kurt Busch. Biffle’s first Cup win came at the summer Daytona race and he’s got two Southern 500s to his credit — no small feat.
Biffle’s personality also emerged, away from the shadow of his teammates in two post-NASCAR moments. The first was during SRX, where I was lucky to connect with Biffle during 2021-23. He nearly won twice, at Stafford Motor Speedway in the ’21 opener and at South Boston Speedway in ’22. In his early 50s, Biffle showed he hadn’t lost a step while bringing both energy and excitement that elevated the series.
The second, and most heroic, moment came in the weeks and months that followed Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. Biffle’s push to fly over supplies and rescue those trapped in the mountains after devastating flooding made him a hero in the eyes of so many.
After years of perhaps toiling in the background, people could actually see the type of amazing person Biffle was. And then, he popped up as a teacher to Cleetus, one of the biggest new personalities within stock car racing moving the needle and bringing in new fans. The two had a very public friendship and were hoping to race against each other sometime in 2026. The future seemed bright.
It’s still inconceivable to me that, suddenly, there’s no future at all.
Biffle Is the First of a NASCAR Generation to Leave Us
The death of Dale Earnhardt back in 2001, a year before Biffle’s Cup debut, capped off a horrible nine-month stretch where we saw three NASCAR Cup drivers die on the racetrack: Earnhardt, Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin Jr. It was a black cloud to which those in NASCAR had sadly grown accustomed.
And then, through a combination of luck and safety improvements, the cloud lifted.
The millennial generation of NASCAR haven’t had to deal with these moments where tragedy forces them to wrestle with their own mortality. Just a handful of drivers have died far too soon, all of them off the track: John Andretti from cancer. Same with Bobby Hamilton. Michael Annett just last week … it’s a very short list. I might argue a tragedy of this nature and with a driver as famous as Biffle hasn’t happened since perhaps the Dan Wheldon fatal wreck at Las Vegas Motor Speedway some 14 years ago.
Biffle’s death at age 55 made him the first Hall of Fame-caliber driver to pass away a lot of 30- and 40-something race fans grew up watching. Beyond the obvious sadness, there’s a loss of innocence in that, a moment where we must all stand up and realize Father Time comes for all of us.
NASCAR Plane Crash PTSD
The sport is forever intertwined with small plane crashes that have ended in tragedy. 1992 Cup champion Alan Kulwicki lost his life in a plane crash outside Bristol Motor Speedway in April 1993. Davey Allison wound up killed in a helicopter crash outside Talladega Superspeedway that summer.
And then, perhaps the biggest one of all: 10 people were killed, including Ricky Hendrick, in the tragic Hendrick Motorsports plane crash outside Martinsville Speedway in 2004.
Once again, the sport has gotten lucky in recent years: Dale Earnhardt Jr. surviving a scary plane crash in 2019, Jack Roush’s plane crash, several emergency landings of race team planes due to various mechanical issues. This time, sadly, the outcome was tragic.
All it does is remind people in this sport of the pain of plane crashes past. It’s a trauma that never completely leaves you; no amount of time and comfort fully removes that scar from your heart.
Add the scar of Greg Biffle’s plane to the list. It’s a tragedy we’ll grieve but never fully grasp why, and one that leave us with the worst possible question in our most vulnerable moments.
When might this happen again?
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 50+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.
An insightful article, Tom. I am 70 and at some point deaths seem commonplace. For people over 70, well, they lived a good life. Between 50 and 70, they at least got to live a good part of their lives. Anyone under 50 is simply a tragedy. And at least 3 of those people on board and likely more, fell into that last category. A lot of Greg Biffle race fans are my age or older. It brings back memories of when we were all younger, and the reality that we no longer are.
Its a good time to go visit kids and grandkids and embrace the holidays with a new abandon. Love each other while you can, because things can change in a second for even the healthiest and most vibrant among us.
Listening to Greg’s friends discussing their feeling on the Nascar Channel is very humanizing for the sport. This is a huge loss.
I was a big Alan Kulwicki fan. I was sure that after he won his championship, he would get the respect he deserved. Unfortunately, it was short-lived. The Biffle crash definitely brought back memories of that awful April morning.
The fact that the crash victims included Biffle’s children and another child make dealing with this tragedy especially painful. It helps me to remember that though our hearts ache, their souls are in paradise.
its so terribly sad to see a tragedy unfold taking an entire family.
Greg did so much after
Finishing my sentence. Greg did so much for so many after Helene.