It’s been a somber weekend, understandably, at Charlotte Motor Speedway, as the entire industry attempts to process the immense loss of two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch, who passed away Thursday after a sudden illness.

Busch has driven the No. 8 Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing since 2023, but for many years before that (from 2008 to 2022), the Las Vegas, Nevada-native was the driver of the forever-recognizable No. 18 M&M’s Toyota, fielded by Joe Gibbs Racing.

On Saturday, in the wake of Busch’s passing, Joe Gibbs visited the Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Center to talk about the tragedy that occurred this past week.

“Well, just a terrible time, obviously. For all of us, the NASCAR family, and so a few thoughts I had first were just for Sam, Brexton, and Lennix, Tom, Gaye, just for that family,” Gibbs said. “Our focus is going to be the future for them, because we’re going to be there, and so whatever they need, we want to be a part of that, and so we just try to encourage Sam and everything that she’s going to go through.”

The Gibbs family, unfortunately, knows about a tragedy like this all too well… In 2019, JD Gibbs, co-founder of Joe Gibbs Racing, passed away from a degenerative brain disease. Three years later, Joe’s other son, Coy Gibbs, passed away, the night after his son, Ty , won the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series championship.

“I just want to say that for Richard and RCR, we just wanted to work in concert with them, and I reached out to Richard and told him that we just want to be together on this,” Gibbs added. “We feel so, so much hurt for him, and RCR. Just a terrible thing to happen to them, and what’s happened to him also in the past, and so we just really want to do anything we can to encourage RCR, and we want to work together as we go forward with this with them.”

After that initial statement, other than a few cautions, the rest of the press conference with Joe Gibbs was just telling stories about Kyle Busch…

“The first time I heard about Kyle Busch, Coy, my son, was racing Trucks, and I forget where they were, it was like Nashville or someplace. I don’t know where it was, and so I called him to kind of see how it was going after practice, and he said, ‘Hey Dad, there’s a 16-year-old here, and said he’s two seconds faster than anybody. He said, I hope to kick him out’. What happened, it was true. It was Kyle Busch, and they kicked him out. He was too young to be there and was so fast.”

Gibbs says that he came into the media center on Saturday with three key memories of Kyle Busch that he wanted to share. The first was 2015, when Busch broke his leg in an accident at Daytona International Speedway in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series.

“The very first thing was that wreck, the crash in 2015, and so I think it said a lot about Kyle because I’ve been around a lot of athletes in football, and what have you. When they get a serious injury, that can really affect you, your thoughts, going forward.”

There was no negative impact to Busch’s psyche, though, says Gibbs, who, when he arrived at the hospital, overheard the driver hounding the doctors to get him fixed up so that he could get back into a race car… although Gibbs quips, “I don’t know if he was drugged up some or not.”

Even the day after getting home from the hospital, Gibbs went to visit Busch and saw him doing pull-ups with a trampoline and wiggling his toes – even though the doctor told him not to. That year, Busch missed 12 NASCAR Cup Series events, but returned to competition, won races, got inside the top 30 in points to make the post-season, only to go on to win the championship.

Another story that Gibbs shared Saturday was of a race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, where Busch finished in second… “So, I kind of slid over to where they’re interviewing people there, because sometimes, sometimes, there might be something I could have to handle afterwards,” Gibbs said while laughing. “So, I slid over there, and his interview was great, and so I said, well, gosh, you know, he must be happy. He finished second, so he’s probably happy.”

“He walked 10 yards to me, I was standing there, and he just like this, he went, your cars suck, and he kept right walking,” Gibbs recalled, saying that situation just shows the kind of fire Busch had to win.

The third story is about something off the racetrack…

“There’s a part of him that I just, I just really admitted, and that was kind of highlighted in several things with his personality and the way he deals with things. One of those is, you guys may know, we do a Christmas video, and when J.D. was here, he and Dave Alpern were Sal and Pem, and they were – this wild video, and all kinds of stupid stuff. They had all kinds of skits, and everyone, and I’m going to tell you, that Kyle Busch, he loved that.”

“Every single thing we asked him to do, at one point, they had these plastic gloves, and they shoved it down over their head. They got fingers up like this. He was full bore on all that. Whether it was in a car, singing all kinds of stupid songs and stuff, he was full bore on the, he had a great sense of humor, but things like that. When he was away from a racetrack, he was so funny.”

“Then we had one skit, I always remember. It was probably the best one we had. It was Kyle, and we had the young drivers, you know, in Xfinity, sitting in front of him. He was going to be the anger management coach, coaching the guys up, and it was all these funny things about how to handle things when they go wrong, so the other part of that too, that I would just say to you; as we all know, in our sport, one of the most important things for a driver at this level to be able to, you know, represent some of the biggest and best companies in the world.”

Kyle Busch is proof that it isn’t just about success on the racetrack. Of course, the record book is permanently stamped with his name on just about every page, but his personality off the racetrack was another big piece of what made him a larger-than-life figure.

“I’ll have Kyle Busch stories forever,” Gibbs said. “I can’t tell you how many funny things he did, and some of the things would shock, shock me, and everything, and I’m going, what the heck is he doing? I said, For God’s sake, quit pushing my buttons. Say that to yourself. Funny things like that.”

For Joe Gibbs, Kyle Busch will always be a key part of his NASCAR experience – both personally and professionally.

Photo: Rusty Jarrett, LAT Images