“This one is for Kyle,” Daniel Suárez said through the rain and tears as he celebrated winning the Coca-Cola 600 on Sunday. “If it wasn’t for Kyle, I wasn’t going to be an [O’Reilly Auto Parts Series] champion. I wasn’t going to have my shot in the Cup Series, and to be able to win this race for him is unbelievable.”
Suárez can trace back many connections to Busch, who died at age 41 last week. Not only were the two friends and former teammates at Joe Gibbs Racing, but Suárez’s first full season in a NASCAR national series, 2015, was spent driving for JGR in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and Kyle Busch Motorsports in the Craftsman Truck Series.
After winning at Charlotte, Suárez credited the mentorship he received from Busch with making him a better driver. “Back in 2015, Kyle and I used to be on the phone every single week,” he said. “Because he was helping me, trying to understand what I needed to look for, trying to understand the race track.”
“He didn’t have to help me. … He didn’t have to help this Mexican kid who could barely speak English,” Suárez said. “He was a real legend of the sport, and he took the time every single week to help me. For me, that spoke very highly of not who he is as a driver, [but] who he is as a person. And most people didn’t know that side of him. I got to know that side of him.”
Among those in the current Cup Series garage, though, Suárez wasn’t alone in seeing that side of Busch.
In the days since his death, much has (rightly) been made about Kyle Busch’s greatness as a driver. All of the wins — 63 in Cup (ninth-most all-time) and 234 across all national series (by far the most in history) — and the talent, the run-ins and the hilarious quotes. Busch was a one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life personality and performer whose individual impact will be irreplaceable.
But just as irreplaceable as part of Busch’s legacy is what he did as a team owner. It was clear from the number of KBM hats worn in tribute around the garage this past weekend at Charlotte that Busch’s team left its fingerprints all over the modern Cup Series. And the numbers make that fact even clearer.
From its start in the Truck Series during the early 2010s, Kyle Busch Motorsports has seen the influence of its alumni base grow by leaps and bounds over the past 15-plus years. So far this season, 27.2% of all Cup Series starts have been made by drivers (other than Kyle Busch) who drove for KBM in either the O’Reilly, Trucks or ARCA Menards Series, including 22% by drivers who effectively broke through after driving for KBM — those who’d made fewer than 10 career Cup starts before their KBM debut.
And while the share of wins for KBM alumni and pipeline drivers is down to start 2026 — Tyler Reddick (a non-KBM alumnus) winning so many races will do that — last season saw 38.9% (!) of all Cup Series wins belong to former KBM drivers, including 22.2% for pipeline alumni for the fourth consecutive season. (That was an average of eight wins per season in a 36-race schedule, for four years running.)
Suárez provided the latest entry in that category this season, while last year saw additions by William Byron, Christopher Bell and Bubba Wallace. (The overall total was also padded by plenty of wins by Denny Hamlin via his five career KBM starts in the Trucks.) Before that, the KBM tally saw contributions from Harrison Burton, Erik Jones, Kasey Kahne, and even other all-time greats like Martin Truex Jr., Greg Biffle and Kyle’s brother, Hall of Famer Kurt Busch.
And remember, these stats all exclude Kyle Busch himself — so nothing is boosted by his own 47 wins since 2010, which rank third-most in Cup behind only Hamlin and Kevin Harvick.
Overall, the best post-KBM career in Cup belongs to Hamlin, which makes sense — he’s one of the defining drivers of the 2010s and 2020s. (Though, in a testament to Busch’s greatness, Hamlin hasn’t quite passed Busch yet on the all-time Cup wins list even after posting some of his best seasons recently amidst Busch’s late-career slump.) But among those who came up in the KBM pipeline, Byron and Bell have established themselves as perennial title contenders — we flagged both as potential first-time champs in preseason — while Jones, Wallace, Suárez, Noah Gragson, Todd Gilliland and many more (including the talented Corey Heim) have either tasted success in Cup or could find the winner’s circle someday.
Obviously, Busch will (and should) always be remembered first for what he did behind the wheel, because few drivers in NASCAR history ever did more. But KBM ensured that his impact didn’t stop when he climbed out of the car. Even now that he is gone, Busch’s legacy will keep showing up in the drivers he taught, the careers he launched and the Cup Series garage he helped shape — with roughly a third of all cars in the field in any given week, and nearly half of all winners, like Suárez on Sunday, being able to say they trace back some part of their story to the team that Rowdy built.