EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsAFTER KYLE BUSCH died, one NASCAR driver's wife had a question that brought her husband to tears.Busch, 41, could see the end of his career approaching and had a plan. He would transition to coaching his son, 11-year-old Brexton, a child racing prodigy in the mold of his father. But before that next chapter, Busch developed pneumonia, then sepsis. He died May 21, six days after his last win and four days after his last race.Amanda Wallace, thinking of Busch's two children, and of her own, asked her husband why Kyle would drive himself that hard when a second chapter of life was right around the corner.What is it about climbing through that window that makes it so hard to walk away?Bubba Wallace's mind went to Busch's postrace comments after winning the Dover truck race, his final victory: "You never know when the last one is," Busch said.Bubba was the perfect person to answer Amanda's question. He considered Busch a hybrid rival-mentor. In 2010, while vying for a NASCAR audition at the Drive for Diversity Combine in Virginia, Wallace drove while suffering from swine flu, spending race day sequestered in a motor home until the last possible moment. Wallace estimates he hasn't seen a doctor in the past decade."And I'm not bragging about that," Wallace said. "It drives my wife up a wall. I don't care to know what's wrong with me. If I can still compete, then let's go."Amanda hoped Busch's death had jolted something loose. Wallace assured her it had not. He repeated a line she had heard before."No one's ever getting in my car unless I'm dead," Wallace said. "It's literally got to be death. That's what it came down to for him, unfortunately."'His soul found another gear'Here's what toughness in NASCAR looks like: Ricky Rudd went airborne out of Turn 4 during the 1984 Busch Clash at Daytona and spun violently before crashing in an infield heap. Rudd suffered a concussion, rib injuries and two swollen eyes.When swelling interfered with his vision at the Daytona 500 a week later, Rudd had his eyelids taped open. He finished seventh. The next week, still using the tape to see, he won at Richmond.And then there's Dale Earnhardt Jr., getting in the car a week after his father died in the Daytona 500 in 2001. And wrecking. Even when the wounds aren't physical, you just get back in the car.Here is Kyle Busch's contribution to NASCAR's gritty lore:On Feb. 21, 2015, on Lap 112 of the Xfinity Series season opener at Daytona International Speedway, Busch was testing the boundaries of NASCAR orthodoxy, attempting to push Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Erik Jones into a faster lane of traffic in a tight late-race cluster, but he did so before the pack entered a straightaway. Jones spun out and Busch lost control. His No. 54 Toyota sped across the grass infield and into the interior wall at 90 mph.The impact drove the engine and chassis backward and flung Busch forward. His right leg slammed into the displaced metal, breaking his tibia and fibula. The brake pedal broke his left foot.Samantha Busch, pregnant with the couple's first child, a boy due that May, followed her husband to Halifax Health Medical Center along with Joe Gibbs, the Super Bowl-winning, Hall of Fame former NFL head coach and Busch's boss at Joe Gibbs Racing."He was laying on the bed there, and he was telling the surgeon, 'Get me in there and fix this. I need to get back to racing again,'" Gibbs remembered. "They put the rod in that night."That guy came back in 11 weeks."Busch won his first race of the season on June 28 at Sonoma, a winding road course that places a premium on constant alternating braking and acceleration. He won four races, clinching the Cup Series championship in Homestead, Florida."I think his soul found another gear to go even further in motorsports," said his older brother, NASCAR Hall of Famer Kurt Busch. "He's back, and he's not going to look back."In interviews, Kyle Busch compared the feeling to watching his son being born."Everybody around him kind of saw that," Gibbs said. "Everybody knew what was taking place. He had big surgeries -- foot, leg -- and so all those young drivers were kind of watching all that."NASCAR fans were watching, too.During the championship race, NBC's broadcast team described it as the most improbable comeback in sports history. Busch became NASCAR's new tough guy.Eleven years later, that reputation made the details of his death that much more stunning -- killed by sepsis, not a ride into the wall. "Rowdy" was felled by a cold that progressed into pneumonia, then sepsis.Three weeks after his death, one of Busch's fans, Joseph Mendoza, a 59-year-old retired small-business owner in Sacramento, had been prescribed antibiotics and prednisone for an earlier respiratory illness that wasn't going away. Driving home from a work lunch, he resolved to sleep it off and avoid another visit to a doctor."I would say I go if I have to, and my wife is bugging me, but it's not my first choice," Mendoza said.Mendoza's attitude isn't unique among men. Men are almost twice as likely as women to have no usual source of healthcare, according to the CDC's 2024 National Health Interview Survey. A 2019 study found that avoidance of healthcare was linked to perceived male roles, among other factors. And a 2016 study found that linking one's self-worth to masculine ideals was associated with barriers to seeking healthcare among both men and women.Heading home, Mendoza felt that if he closed his eyes for more than a few seconds, he'd fall asleep behind the wheel. He thought of nothing but his warm bed. Then he thought of Busch."As soon as I remembered Kyle, I went, 'OK, I'm going to go.'"He went to urgent care. They sent him to the hospital. Doctors there told him he was suffering from sepsis and hours away from organ failure. If not for Busch, he said, and the family's transparency in sharing his cause of death, he might not be alive. Mendoza's grateful son shared the story on a motorsports podcast."Samantha and the family making that news saved my life," Mendoza said.Kyle's 'ass-o-meter'Kyle Busch began his racing education on his older brother Kurt's trailer, following him around the garage and soaking up knowledge. By the late 2000s, the roles were reversed. Kurt was consulting his baby brother on telemetry."He was easily able to digest the digital era," Kurt said. "Now I'm on his trailer, so to speak: 'What did you pull up at Sonoma? What were you focused on?'"The analytics were Busch's baseline, but not his North Star, Kurt said. Busch was guided by the feedback a racing simulator can't replicate and data can't describe -- how it feels in the driver's seat when, for instance, the rear wheels begin to slide or tires approach their expiration date."The ass-o-meter," Kurt said.And Busch remembered how tracks registered on the ass-o-meter in specific moments with startling accuracy.Much of Josh Wise's work centers on film study of races and devising optimal ways to approach various scenarios on race day. This spring, before Busch got sick, he met with the former NASCAR driver turned Chevrolet driver-performance trainer a handful of times to discuss strategies and test out a potential partnership. Wise remembers suggesting a certain maneuver on a stretch of Martinsville track. Busch pushed back, recalling a moment when a very different strategy prevailed."And it's like, Lap 232 of the 2022 Martinsville race," Wise said. "He could tell you a lap number from four years ago, and who was there and what happened, and have a good guess of why it happened, and you're like, 'Wow, how is that possible?'"Busch's approach on race day often bucked convention. He gambled. Keselowski recalled watching him pass slower trucks on the apron at Atlanta more than a decade ago. "I never even thought of doing that," Keselowski said. "I think he really enjoyed just being different and innovating."Being different didn't always work.A decade ago at Watkins Glen, Keselowski said, first lap, first corner, Busch took a shot."Normally, the corner that we were in, you would go through in second gear. He wanted to downshift into first gear to try to beat me up off the corner, and spun out -- crashed."What was impressive was, he had the guts to take the risks he took. And when they didn't work out, he had the confidence to try another one. Most people are like, 'Man, I looked so dumb,' and their confidence gets beaten down. That was not Kyle."The Watkins Glen wreck reminded Keselowski of another fond Busch memory, this time at 10,000 feet. Keselowski, Busch and a handful of other drivers found themselves on a cross-country private flight home from a West Coast race. Busch joined a game of rummy in progress and lost spectacularly."He didn't take it very well," Keselowski said. "Some beverages might have flowed as the game was going, and he told us all how we weren't playing the game right."Everybody's got different rummy rules, and his rummy rules were different than ours. We were like, 'OK, well, you sat down with us.' And he was like, 'I'd be winning if you were playing by my rules.'"We all thought that was the funniest, because that was quintessential Kyle."Fans caught on quickly to Busch's willingness to air grievances in public. For the majority of his career, he was NASCAR's heel."Kyle was unapologetic about anything that he didn't like, and that often got him in trouble," Wallace said. "But he could win and back it up and make everything OK. He could go and motherf--- the sponsors or whatever, and he was like, 'Oh, I did it from Victory Lane. What are you mad about?'"'A flaw in the driver's DNA'In Delaware, Busch told driver Daniel Suarez he'd been dealing with a "little cold" for a couple of weeks, Suarez recalled."He just sounded like he had a stuffed nose or something," Suarez said.During a typical NASCAR race, a driver's heart rate accelerates to 140-170 beats per minute for the majority of the race, which can last anywhere from three to five hours. Temperatures in the driver's seat range from 120 to 140 degrees, and researchers have measured drivers' core body temperatures reaching 102 degrees.In the summer, drivers often leave the car 6 to 8 pounds lighter than when they buckled in, suffering from severe dehydration despite having consumed so much fluid before and during a race that some quietly urinate in their race suits at 190 mph.It's impossible to know whether continuing to drive killed Busch, or whether taking a weekend off might've saved him. Some peers who encountered him in his final week could tell he was sick, but others couldn't. Driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was stunned to learn Busch died of pneumonia just days after they chatted in Delaware. "I didn't think anything was wrong with him," Stenhouse said. "I was talking to my wife about it. I'm like, 'Man, there's no way he was sick.'"Kyle Larson, a driver whose son competes against Brexton, agreed that Busch sounded ill. "From what I understand, he was seeking out and getting tested for whatever," Larson said. "I don't want people to think that he wasn't taking care of himself."Kurt Busch, who met with family members and Kyle's doctors in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the days after his death, said he was told by a doctor that Kyle's death, a result of rapidly worsening pneumonia, was "one in a million.""That's what makes all of this so frustrating and difficult to accept," Kurt said.Kurt views Kyle's death as the tragic consequence of an ambitious plan to stay competitive long enough to share a NASCAR track with Brexton in a clean handoff from father to son. Kurt's first Daytona 500, in 2001, was Dale Earnhardt's last race. On the last lap of his life, Earnhardt was running in third place behind his son, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Michael Waltrip, both driving for Earnhardt's team. Earnhardt played the bouncer, blocking the path to victory for anyone in fourth place."That's the power Kyle wanted to have," Kurt said. "Why not take a week off, or take a couple weeks off to regroup?"My brother's mentality was perfect for the end of his career to try to time it out to where his racing would coincide with Brexton. And that way Brexton's getting the utmost attention from a current driver to develop him faster, quicker, stronger."So he just worked and worked and worked, and unfortunately, a tragedy happened."Kyle Petty, a former NASCAR driver and the third leg in an unprecedented run of four generations of Petty men who raced in the series, had a similar plan. His grandfather had raced alongside his father, Richard, and Richard raced with Kyle, and so Kyle planned to race alongside his son, Adam, before Adam was killed in a wreck at New Hampshire International Speedway at the age of 19. Kyle Petty's ambition, like Busch's, had been to race next to his son."It's about learning from the very first teacher that you have, your parents, having that wisdom passed along to you by someone who's been there, who's done it," Petty said.Could that ambition have pushed Busch into the red?"There's a flaw in the driver's DNA," Petty said. "Somewhere in our DNA, we never, ever, ever believe it's going to happen to us. It's always somebody else. It's denial."In the larger picture of what the sport is, you have to have that denial, because if you don't have that denial, that ability to come out the other side of it, then you can't crawl through that window and drive a car."Richard Childress Racing, which Busch joined for the 2023 season, declined to answer questions from ESPN about what the team knew about Busch's health in the weeks leading up to his death. Through a spokesperson, Kyle's wife, Samantha Busch, declined an interview request.Knowing what we know now, did Busch make one final bad wager? Would his peers have done it any differently?For Keselowski, the question itself isn't fair. If Busch had been the sort of driver who took a race off for a cold, he might not have made it this far.Keselowski thinks of his racing career as a flywheel, a wheel that is weighted to maintain momentum when propulsion eases. It took sacrifice to get the wheel spinning, Keselowski says. Time spent away from family. Showing up sick or injured, rain or shine."I think in a lot of athletes' minds, you get out of the race car and you think that flywheel will stop. And you're always wondering, can I restart it?" Keselowski said. "Particularly as you get older, it gets more and more worrisome. I think Kyle felt all that pressure."And then there is the thought that, 'I drove through concussions, through a broken ankle, broken leg, broken ribs, colds. I ran a race when I had the flu and won it. So what's so big about this?' I could understand that. I personally don't feel like driving the race car was a mistake for Kyle."Wallace recalled facing his wife's next question -- whether Busch's death had rattled the ethos that delivered Wallace to the pinnacle of the sport. He knows his answer wasn't the right one, but it was true.Would he think twice now about racing sick?"No," he said through tears. "It's a waste of time."'Push yourself harder'In "Ford v Ferrari," James Mangold's Academy Award-winning account of Ford Motor Company's ascendance in professional racing, Christian Bale portrays the legendary mechanic and driver Ken Miles. Sunburned, filthy and slumped from decades bent over a car hood, Miles warns Matt Damon's character he'll chuck a wrench at his head during an argument. Then he does it, smashing a windshield behind Damon.The character reminded Kurt of his dad, pushing his sons to get more out of the race cars he assembled for them."It's a little different than what it is today, how fathers and people communicate," Kurt said. "You know, there might have been a few more swear words from my dad, whereas Kyle and Samantha were raising Brexton and Lennix very polite."Kurt said his brother honed a more nurturing leadership approach at Kyle Busch Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing, where current NASCAR Cup Series mainstays including Christopher Bell, Wallace, Suarez, Noah Gragson and Ty Gibbs -- Joe's grandson -- got their starts.Suarez joined Busch's team in trucks part-time in 2015 and, though he was still learning English, began calling Busch weekly to discuss the upcoming races. Busch spent those half-hour calls describing how to approach the corners, where the track's imperfections lay and how the car would respond to each nook of asphalt.Then, in 2016, Suarez passed Busch on the final lap of an Xfinity Series race for his first victory, becoming the first Mexican-born driver to win a NASCAR national series race. Busch found Suarez at Victory Lane and told him: "No more phone calls.""He taught me that to be successful in this sport you have to be selfish," Suarez said. "He never said that, but the way that he was talking to me, I learned that."Bell, then 20, debuted in the summer of 2015 for Kyle Busch Motorsports and would go on to race full-time for KBM in the Truck series, NASCAR's third tier, the next year. He won the Truck series championship a year later. Currently sixth in the Cup Series standings, Bell raced at Pocono in June, a week after breaking his wrist in the hardest crash measured in NextGen cars.In a word, the lesson Bell took from Busch: Urgency.At first, Bell thought it was normal for the player-boss of a motorsports team to walk drivers through race prep, tinker with the minutiae of car mechanics, then race in the Truck series on Friday and the Cup Series on Sunday. Later, he realized, no one in racing seemed to be quite as time-invested as Busch."He demanded greatness from everybody that he came in contact with, at all times, in every phase, whether it was his crew chief, his engineers, his mechanics, his drivers, his truck program," Bell said. "And it really sank into me that that's what made him so great."There was nobody more passionate about winning than him."Ty Gibbs thinks of Busch when he gets angry on the track. He was introduced to Kyle at 6 years old and grew closer to him as tragedy struck twice -- Ty's uncle, J.D., died at 49 in 2019, then Ty's father, Coy, died at 49 the night Ty won the 2022 Xfinity Series. In 2021, when Ty was a NASCAR rookie, he was in the habit of flipping off drivers who crossed him or didn't show him the respect that he now realizes he hadn't earned.In front of a group of Gibbs racing employees, Busch called him out: You got to stop that, man. What are you doing? Like, you look like an idiot. You look like a d-bag."And I agreed. I stopped immediately," Gibbs said.After Gibbs won his first Cup Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway on April 12, Busch texted him: "Yo man. Congratulations. Awesome to see that today. Well deserved. Hopefully the first of many."Four months later, after Gibbs again claimed a Cup Series victory, at the Iowa Corn 350 in August, Joe Gibbs Racing invited the Busch family including Brexton to the team's banner raising at the shop in Huntersville, North Carolina, then invited him to join the team's competition meeting to discuss the upcoming race in Richmond.In 2017, Busch saw a hesitation to commit in new KBM hire Noah Gragson. He needed to take better care of his body in the long term by changing his diet, Busch told him in a one-on-one meeting. And in the short term, he needed to start winning."He had a standard that he held everybody to," Gragson said. "And if you didn't meet that standard, he wasn't satisfied. He made everybody around him better just based off his standard."You can get more out of the car, Busch told him. And you can push yourself harder.'Thinking about the end'How much more did Busch have to give racing? How much further might he have pushed himself? In a visit to Denny Hamlin's podcast last year, Busch told his former teammate he wanted to win the Daytona 500, the only "unofficial major" NASCAR race that eluded him. But if he retired before doing so, "that wouldn't make or break me," Busch said."It's very easy to be content with the amount of wins and the amount of accomplishments that he had," Hamlin told ESPN. "You're like, 'What's the difference between 60 and 70 wins? Nobody cares.' I think he was finding just as much accomplishment and sense of achievement when his kid would be racing."But racing had also been part of his life for so long that I think it did scare him, thinking about the end."The comments came amid a career slump for Busch. In 2022, he finished outside of NASCAR's top 10 for the first time since 2012. At the time of his death, he hadn't won a Cup Series race since 2023.On the same podcast, this April, Hamlin said of Busch's recent struggles: "We have to be honest about our expectations. If you're expecting Kyle Busch to just go back to Victory Lane on a regular basis, you are kidding yourselves."Busch in a subsequent interview said he could "make life hell" for Hamlin on the track.Instead, the two hashed it out privately. Then Busch won the Truck series race at Dover. That weekend after the race, due to a scheduling glitch, the two did an onstage Q&A with fans that each had been scheduled to do separately. Busch found Hamlin just before they went on stage and needled his old teammate back, one more time."See? I can still do it," Busch said."Proud of you, buddy," Hamlin said.On Sunday night after the Cup Series race in Dover, Busch and Stenhouse sat in the driver's seats of their respective rental cars parked on the tarmac at Wilmington Airport and waited for their race teams to arrive and join them on private jets headed home.Two years ago, Stenhouse punched Busch in the face after a race in which Busch intentionally sent Stenhouse into a wall. Now they wondered aloud who the stewards of the sport would be when they retired. Conversation drifted to their own children, and Busch, 41, shared his plan: Leave full-time Cup Series racing, pursue a Truck series championship and race alongside Brexton.Eventually, he would coach his son full-time."He had this whole succession plan, and he stayed more busy doing that than he did anything else," Stenhouse said. "Anytime we were talking, it was about Brexton racing. He was definitely more happy talking about Brexton racing than anything else."Three days later, Busch coughed up blood and struggled to breathe during a visit to General Motors' technical facility in Concord, North Carolina. The next day, he was gone.'You can't drive with fear'During a memorial ceremony at Charlotte Motor Speedway three days later, Kyle Larson's son, Owen, found Brexton standing next to Samantha and embraced his track rival. Larson said he hadn't expected Owen to do it and was proud of his son's instincts; Owen had been able to separate the personal and the competitive."Owen wants to beat Brexton super bad," Larson said. "Brexton, as Kyle did, set the bar so high that they're the ones that you're chasing. So, when you get beat by them it sucks, but when you do beat them it feels really good. That's probably where Owen is at mentally, as probably every kid is racing Brexton."Fifty-seven days later on July 17, Brexton Busch claimed his first win after the death of his father in a micro sprint race in Tulsa, Oklahoma.If he continues on his current trajectory, he'll soon be a NASCAR driver faced with the same sort of decisions his father faced.Race or rest? Stay in bed or climb through the window?Busch's longtime former media relations man and friend, Bill Janitz, said Kyle taught Brexton one principle so essential that lacking it would render any other traits moot."If you're going to do this, you can't drive with fear," Janitz said. "No fear. Does that bleed into your personal life? I think it has to. But I think Kyle impressed upon him that that's what it takes to be great at this."
