Doing the watching the nascar

i was at the 2015 daytona xfinity race where he crashed into that wall. i remember wondering if i had just witnessed the worst. i remember being relieved as hell to hear he was gonna be ok. he came back to win the 2015 championship and i loved it. he was one hell of a prickly, mercurial, difficult, hilarious, brilliant, insanely talented race car driver, and i loved him for it.

it has been one of the joys and privileges of my life as a motorsports fan to watch him grow and mature, become the kind of elder statesman of the sport and endless font of wisdom and advice for the younger generations — like maybe most people thought he’d never be — while still kick ass and take names, one of the best to ever put foot to pedal to floorboard. for my own reasons, i put my motorsports love on the back burner for a while in the late 2010s, but then covid happened and i turned on a race for lack of anything else to do and watched in realtime as he (completely accidentally, i will add) wrecked the driver that would become my favorite. and something flipped inside me. and since then i’ve had a near-feral love for the sport in a way i hadn’t experienced in a very long time.

kyle busch was a huge part of that love. he was an icon, an institution, as towering and immovable as a mountain. he was inevitable. i was lucky to see him win in-person, at bristol dirt in 2022 in a literal turn-4 pass on the final lap, one of the most chaotic finishes i’ve ever seen. i was there with my dad, and both of us looked at each other like “what the hell just happened?” then we couldn’t help but cheer when kyle did The Bow.

speaking of my dad — a lifelong racing fan and the reason i got into motorsports in the first place — he told me once that nothing will break your heart like motorsports. god, it’s so fucking true. this sport has broken my heart so many times in so many ways, but this one, man. this one has ripped me open. it’s impossible to express how deep the ache is. why this has hurt me in the depths of my soul.

he was so young. he was my age. and now he’s gone. it doesn’t seem real. it probably won’t, not for a long time.

grief is not linear. and it can’t be rushed. it just has to be lived and experienced, and whoever you are at the end of it — if and when you ever get there — is not the same as the person you were before.

thank you for everything, kyle fucking busch. you meant so much to so many. you meant so much to me. we won’t be the same without you, and we sure as hell will never forget you.