Kyle Busch’s victory unites families, caps a year of pain and triumph
HOMESTEAD, Fla. — As Kyle Busch ran the most important laps of his life, wheeling his No. 18 through turn after turn after turn, the most important people in his life gathered in his pit box, watching and waiting and praying.
Gaye Busch, Kyle’s mother, stood alone underneath the box’s awning, earphones in her ears, listening in on Kyle’s radio channel. Joe Gibbs, Kyle’s team owner, paced a tight line next to the pit box, checking stats taped to the wall, checking the track, over and over again. Samantha Busch, Kyle’s wife, dressed more for an evening on South Beach than a night at the races, watched the laps wind down with tears in her eyes.
Twenty laps remaining until NASCAR crowned its new champion. Kyle had opened up a several-second lead on the three other challengers for the championship. All around the pit box, cameras and onlookers had gathered. A few feet away, the throngs that had jammed the retiring Jeff Gordon’s pit stall all weekend had dissipated. Gordon’s story, as good as it was, was the past; Busch was the present and, perhaps, the future.
Twelve laps remaining. Kyle’s comfortable lead on his challengers vanished with the wave of a caution flag for debris on the track. Gaye’s head dropped. Gibbs — churchgoing Gibbs, gentleman Gibbs — thought of a few choice words, and motioned for the crush of fans to move back in order to give the pit crew room to work. Whether the debris was legitimate or not, whether the caution was designed to heighten dramatic impact or not — at this moment, it didn’t matter. Busch had one last hurdle to clear.
Eleven laps remaining. One final pit stop. One final opportunity for a terrible mistake. But everyone wearing an M&M’s firesuit hit their marks, tightening lug nuts and swapping out tires smooth as a song, and Busch wheeled out of the pits to the cheers of those gathered around the box. “Ten more laps, ten more laps,” said someone in the area of the pit box, which by now was jammed with people wearing Toyota and M&M’s golf shirts and gear.
Seven laps remaining. Gibbs motioned toward the pit box’s top level, and J.D. Gibbs, his son, slowly descended the box’s stairs. Earlier this year, J.D. began undergoing testing for issues of brain function, and he stopped coming to races. Tonight, he was here, and Joe Gibbs slipped an arm around his son’s waist. Together, they watched Kyle pass Brad Keselowski to take the outright lead.
Two laps remaining. Anticipation built in the pit box. Fists clenched and unclenched, “come on, come on” repeated over and over again. Gibbs and Gaye Busch remained still, not showing any emotion, not even when the white flag flew signaling just a mile and a half of track between Kyle and a championship. They knew how much could go wrong in a single lap.
One lap remaining. In the car, Kyle had been singing the theme song from one of his six-month-old son’s favorite shows, “VocabuLarry,” keeping himself calm and confusing the hell out of his crew chief.
Four turns remaining. Three. Two. One. In the car, a single tear rolled down Kyle’s cheek — “From the G-forces,” he later joked. And then it was over, the race won, the pit box exploding in ecstasy and relief, the pain and tension of families who’d given so much, suffered so much this year exploding in a primal scream.
Joe Gibbs hugged everyone who came anywhere near him, from tearful Toyota executives to grandchildren born a decade after Gibbs’ last Super Bowl victory. Gaye Busch deftly edged over the pit road wall — this is a woman who knows racing, after all — and dabbed at her eyes. Samantha Busch just wept, falling into the arms of one friend after another as she walked toward the stage already being constructed to honor her husband.
“After all we’ve been through this year…” Samantha Busch said, unable to find any more words.
“Elated. Just elated,” Gaye Busch said, her eyes brimming.
“Every championship is special,” said Joe Gibbs, who’s now won three Super Bowls and four Cup championships, “but this one … this was something special, wasn’t it?”
All Busch had needed to do was finish ahead of the other three challengers for the Sprint Cup — Kevin Harvick, Martin Truex Jr., and the retiring Jeff Gordon — and the championship would be his. But no one wants to back into a title. And after the way this year began, you can forgive Busch for wanting to drive a stake through the heart of this season.
Feb. 21, 2015 surely ranks as one of the worst days in the Busch family’s history. Kurt Busch had spent most of the day trying, and failing, to overturn a NASCAR suspension for a he-said, she-said issue of alleged domestic violence. Later that evening, on Lap 113 of the Xfinity Series race, Kyle Busch plowed head-on into a section of Daytona wall not covered by shock-reducing SAFER barriers. The resulting impact broke Busch’s right leg and left foot.
Kurt Busch returned to driving in March; no charges were filed against him, and NASCAR lifted his suspension. But Kyle spent long days in a hospital bed and long weeks convalescing. This would be a lost season, most assumed; doctors initially indicated that his injuries would take up to six months to heal fully.
Busch was back behind the wheel after three months, missing 11 races. Thanks to a special NASCAR dispensation, he remained eligible to compete for the championship as long as he won a race and finished in the top 30 in the season’s points standings.
Busch won his fifth race back, at Sonoma. Then he won three of the next four. He knocked out the Top-30 requirement, expected to dog him right through the regular season finale in Richmond, in his 11th race back. The rest of the field had a three-month head start on him, and he caught them in a matter of weeks. Gordon’s retirement drew the nostalgia, Joey Logano and Matt Kenseth’s feud drew the headlines, but all along the way, Busch was quietly putting together the foundations of a championship season.
For the first few years of his career, Busch made enemies easily on the race track. A few years back at Atlanta Motor Speedway, a young fan asked Busch, “Are you guys really friends when the race is done?”
“Not always,” Busch responded, and he could have just as easily answered, “Not ever.” He and Dale Earnhardt Jr. once tangled in a late-race wreck in Richmond that earned him the enmity of Junior Nation to this day. He and Harvick once had a memorable bumper-car fight on pit road at Darlington. He and teammate Denny Hamlin snarled at each other during an All-Star race. He earned himself a one-race suspension by slamming his truck into Ron Hornaday’s under caution at a Texas race. Most infamously, he ended up on the receiving end of a Richard Childress headlock after wrecking one too many of Childress’s cars.
You could make the argument — it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to make it to Kyle, but you could try — that breaking bones in both legs was the best thing that could have happened to him. Busch had earned a rep as one of the most talented drivers in the garage, but his attitude tended to obscure admiration, and his skill alone wasn’t enough to navigate the higher pressures of the Chase.
But the Daytona wreck turned Busch into a sympathetic figure, brought low by no fault of his own. Drivers, long critical of what they perceived as insufficient safety protection at tracks, rallied to Busch’s side, speaking on his behalf and, later, welcoming him back into the garage.
“The recovery process, I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re trying to achieve a championship,” Busch said, “but it made us mentally stronger and physically stronger.” Even standing was a challenge; he could put weight on his broken foot only for three seconds at a time. Still, he pushed himself farther than he knew he could, lifting ever-heavier weights, standing and exercising for ever-longer minutes.
Along the way, something changed in Kyle. The wreck showed him the fragility of a Sprint Cup career. The birth of his son — Kyle and Samantha welcomed son Brexton on May 18 — gave the famously race-obsessed Busch a look at life beyond the track.
“What he went through this year, I see a changed Kyle,” Gordon said after the race. “When he came back, not only was he driven and inspired by it, but you could tell he was racing smarter, with more patience, being more deliberate.”
“You see that little guy that he holds in his arms, and you know, it puts things in a different perspective,” Harvick said as Busch celebrated. “It used to be you didn’t want to have kids because it took the fire out of you from driving the car, and now it seems to have calmed a lot of us down to the point where we can focus and do the things that we need to do to concentrate on our jobs.”
Up on the stage, Kyle’s crew threw T-shirts and packets of M&M’s into the crowd. Nearby, Jeff Gordon and Carl Edwards looked on and smiled. In the center of it all, Kyle sprayed his team with champagne, stopping every so often to take a swig of the bottle himself.
A championship trophy. Adoration from the fans who’d so often booed him. Busch’s mother, his team owner, his wife, even Brexton, sporting oversize blue headphones and a tiny “18” T-shirt — all of them around him, all of them celebrating at the pinnacle. We should all be so lucky as Kyle Busch is today.
“I don’t know how you top this,” he said, “but I’d sure like to see.”
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter.
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