1,000 Greatest Drivers: Troy Ruttman

Well, that came as a big shock.

Kyle Busch, the winningest driver in NASCAR’s three national divisions, died of what is believed to be a brain aneurysm that happened while he was practicing on his racing simulator. This was NASCAR’s most shocking death since Dale Earnhardt in 2001. Perhaps it was even more shocking than that because while tragic, on-track fatalities are an unfortunate part of racing while deaths by natural causes for active race car drivers are significantly more rare. Although I know they were somewhat more common especially in the pre-World War II years, like when Johnny Aitken died in the 1918 influenza pandemic, I’m struggling to think of any active drivers at the major league level who died of natural causes rather than an on-track accident in any series since I started watching in the mid-’90s. This comes as a big scare to me particularly because Busch was the first major NASCAR star younger than me, having been born a little over a month after I was. With my various chronic health issues (IBS, ARFID, occasional jaw pain, a fibromyalgia diagnosis I’m dubious about), not to mention visiting Mom in the nursing home so often, I have become increasingly conscious of my own mortality and watching somebody just about my age die this way definitely scares the bejeezus out of me.

While for many fans, Busch was a love-him-or-hate-him kind of driver, I was never really in either camp. He was certainly an exciting driver to watch. In an era when too many drivers were following the corporate blandness paradigm of Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, Busch was probably a necessary corrective to that. I can get why people compared him to Dale Earnhardt since no other driver after Earnhardt really embraced the villain role as Busch to the same extent with the possible exception of Tony Stewart. The funny thing is that I never really bought into Busch’s supposed villain schtick. Yes, he caused a lot of obnoxious on-track intentional crashes, but he was not exactly alone in that category when considering his contemporaries included drivers like Stewart, Kevin Harvick, Denny Hamlin, Carl Edwards, his brother Kurt, Brad Keselowski, and Joey Logano, who were without question equally obnoxious hotheads on-track (or sometimes worse). I thought a lot of the hate Busch got was over the top because I really didn’t see how he stood out head-and-shoulders above any of those other drivers in that regard. On the other hand, that whole era of NASCAR Busch dominated in the 2010s grew very tiring as it seemed like all the Gen X and early millennial drivers were either bland corporate spokesmen or raging egotists with nothing in between (I guess part of the reason Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was so popular is he came closer than anyone else to fitting neither camp). I know boomer racing writers like Robin Miller always used to say things like “hate is good” and it probably is good for ratings, but I find it frustrating that civility has gone the way of the dinosaur simply because it is difficult to monetize. So, while I found myself disgusted by Busch’s antics sometimes, I found myself disgusted by the antics of all those other drivers I listed many times as well and I wound up weirdly defending Busch a lot even when others were hating on him because I still thought the hate he got was disproportionate relative to other drivers who were just as aggressive. And I will admit after he became a father, he mellowed out and became easier to like.

One thing I did admire about Busch was his willingness to acknowledge his own flaws to a greater extent than I saw from most other drivers. As opposed to the stereotypical driver from the ‘90s who would predict they’d win every race in interviews on RPM2Night even if they consistently ran 20th, Busch was deeply open about his weaknesses in a way I seldom saw from his peers, admitting when he thought he sucked and allowing himself to be more vulnerable than many of his peers. As someone who always struggled with my own self-loathing, it was nice to see that wasn’t necessarily a hindrance to having great success. His decision to run so many Busch/Nationwide/Xfinity races and Craftsman/Camping World Truck races mostly just irritated me, as it did when any Cup drivers entered those races. I never thought Busch’s 234 career wins put him on a level with Richard Petty’s 200 Cup Series wins, and I always downplayed any Cup driver’s wins in the other series, whether it was Earnhardt, Mark Martin, Busch, Harvick, whoever. That did kind of make me stop watching the other two series for quite some time, but at least NASCAR mostly legislated the Cup drivers out of the other divisions after that. And admittedly to Busch’s credit, in many of the Nationwide races he won, there were numerous other Cup stars entered, so I will admit probably a lot of those fields were, in fact, deeper than some of the fields Petty competed against on the dirt tracks in the ‘60s.

I suspect Busch has been dealing with a lot of chronic health shit for a very long time. Everything about his sudden decline after 2019 seemed inexplicable to me. David Smith used to always talk about how drivers typically peaked at age 39 and most of the drivers Busch competed against didn’t miss a beat at that age and continued winning. Busch seemed more down on himself in interviews, especially that time when he and Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. crashed in the all-star race and Busch shouted, “I suck just as bad as you!” He had stopped winning in the Cup Series, increasingly stopped leading often, and was making more and more rookie-type mistakes. I think this puts his last few years in a different perspective as I suspect he’s been racing through the pain and silently suffering for a long time, and it gives me a lot more respect for his later seasons than I had at the time. I know that drivers like Earnhardt, Jr. and Kasey Kahne refused to disclose their fairly obvious concussions to the media and they can’t have been the only ones. It seems Busch’s health issues were something scarier and harder to explain than a concussion, so it makes sense that we didn’t hear much about them but I have to believe they were hindering his performance over his last seasons. I pretty much shut every race off at the end, so I never even heard that Busch had gotten injected with a shot at Watkins Glen until after he had died. His interview after his final Craftsman Truck Series win last weekend where he said “you never know when the last one [win] is” now seems creepy and ominous in hindsight, although he definitely wasn’t the first driver I’d heard say that. Even though I wasn’t a fan of his Buschwhacking, which younger fans might think was named after him, I’m glad in retrospect he got that one. And I’m even more pissed at the stupid, stupid ways he lost the 2009 and 2023 Daytona 500s. Above all, I really feel sorry for his kids Brexton and Lennix to lose their father at such a young age.

Since this was the most shocking thing to happen in NASCAR since Earnhardt’s death a quarter century ago, I had to address it. I was going to discuss the Hall of Fame inductions, but it would be wrong to do so here so I guess I’ll do that in the next column. I also didn’t realize when I published the last column that Alexander Rossi had been injured in Monday’s Indy 500 practice because I haven’t been paying much attention to the practice sessions (I’m not sure I even knew there was a Monday practice session, so my registering surprise at Rossi’s front row start was not intended as a sign of disrespect since I published that after his injury). Unfortunately, I ended up falling further behind on my Indy 500 columns due to several IBS attacks and then I didn’t want to publish anything until I had something worthy to say.

Here’s my 1,000 greatest drivers entry on Kyle Busch from 2024. I don’t think these early columns are as good as the ones I’m writing now, so I will definitely have to rewrite this at some point.

Finally, here’s a driver who won an Indy 500 74 years ago whose brother actually competed against Busch in the Craftsman Truck Series, which weirdly brings this full circle.