I went back and watched a lot of stuff from those first few weeks after Dale Earnhardt Sr. died back in 2001 this week. I was only a kid when it happened, didn’t have a clue what NASCAR was, didn’t fully grasp what it meant to the sport until this past week when Kyle Busch died at 41.
I watched Kevin Harvick’s win at Atlanta Motor Speedway. The celebration felt like a weight had been lifted off the shoulders of the sport. Before Harvick climbs out of the car, Darrell Waltrip says something that I had heard echoed throughout the weekend.
“I’ve said it time and time again, a legacy is not about what you did when you were here, it’s about what happens after you’re gone,” Waltrip said.
The best way I’ve heard the impact Busch had on NASCAR was by someone on social media that I saw in passing. He was Dale Sr. to the generation that didn’t get to see Dale Sr. The name that came to mind for many when it came to the sport during his time because of his ability to drive cars and drive interest.
But when I think back to what he meant to me specifically, there’s two things that came to mind.
For one, I really didn’t like him.
It didn’t help that my family included fans of some of his bigger rivals of the late 2000s — Carl Edwards and Jimmie Johnson in particular — but Busch also wasn’t afraid to play the part of heel. He was cocky, and why shouldn’t he have been that way?
In 2008, at just 23 years old, Kyle won 21 NASCAR national series races. Two years later, he won 24.
By the time Busch was 26 years old, he already had what would today be the 10th-most national series wins in NASCAR history at 86. Just above Johnson.
His 19 Cup wins by the end of 2010 — again, at 26 — is more than another future Hall of Famer, Ryan Blaney, has so far in his career at 32. His 24 Truck Series wins put him fourth on the all-time list. With 43 O’Reilly Series wins, he had already passed the original Bushwhacker in Harvick on that series’ all-time victory list.
You can see how a guy can suddenly believe he’s invincible. How losing, even in a sport where 99% of the field does it every week, feels like a total failure. How it can drive someone to do some of the wild things that ‘Wild Thing’ did during his career. Soon enough, you hear the stat, 234 national series wins, a record that will never be touched, and still find yourself finding all the races he could have won but didn’t.
That leads me to the other thing I remember about Busch, and more specifically my childhood: He was everywhere. When I got into NASCAR, I tried to consume as much of it as I could. I’d get home from school on Friday and watch the Truck Series race that night. There’s Kyle. On Saturday, I’d turn on ESPN and watch the now-O’Reilly Series race. There’s Kyle again. Finally, I’d tune into the prerace for the Cup Series and what would they be talking about?
“Well, Kyle Busch already has a win this weekend and is looking for another.”
It was part of what I think made the stars of that era. Did having fields full of Cup drivers have its drawbacks? Sure. But as someone with a growing interest in the sport, the value of name recognition matters.
If you see the names Busch, Harvick, Edwards and others multiple times over the course of a weekend for several weekends in a row, they’re bound to get ingrained into you. The same formula works today. Part of why Carson Hocevar and Kyle Larson are so popular today is their pop-up appearances in NASCAR’s lower divisions and beyond.
Even when they changed the rules of the sport to stop guys like Busch from taking home all the trophies, he went other places. He ran the 24 Hours of Daytona and the Chili Bowl. He tried his hand at Nitrocross, almost wound up in a Formula One car and came so very close to the Indianapolis 500. He turned up at big late model races across the country.
It’s fitting that on the weekend where the eyes of motorsports fans are all over the continent — Indianapolis, Montreal, Charlotte — he was there. On scoring pylons. On hats. On big screens. On the track and in the minds of the drivers who occupied it.
But the moment of the weekend I hoped would happen finally came before the Coca-Cola 600. NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell spoke directly to Kyle’s son, Brexton. Much like the younger of the Busch brothers, social media has allowed fans around the world to get a peak into the development and evolution of Brexton. He’s gone from celebrating his dad’s wins to celebrating his own. Likewise, we saw Kyle grow from the brash, cocky, hard-nosed driver to the veteran who took drivers, his son included, under his wing.
“Brexton and Lennix, your dad loved you with all his heart,” O’Donnell said. “Everyone gathered here, everyone behind you, everybody watching on TV and everybody watching in those grandstands are your family, and we’ve got you.”
It’s what I would want to hear if I was in that spot. It’s a promise I hope the sport keeps. Because one day, probably not too far from now, the entry lists will come out for a weekend of NASCAR racing and it’ll be there again.
The name that I learned about as fast as any other when I got into the sport.
Kyle Busch.
James Krause joined Frontstretch in March 2024 as a contributor. Krause was born and raised in Illinois and graduated from Northern Illinois University. He currently works in Fort Wayne, Indiana covering minor league, college and high school sports. Outside of racing, Krause loves to keep up with football, music, anime and video games.