CONCORD, N.C. — Darnette Vickers stood outside Charlotte Motor Speedway’s garage area Saturday wearing a brown Kyle Busch hoodie and a sodden look of sorrow. “He was my guy,” she said, the reason she fell in love with NASCAR, the reason she is spending her retirement chasing the sport in her RV for 11 races a year.
His shocking death on Thursday devastated her.
Busch became famous and better yet infamous driving the M&M’s car. Vickers worked for Mars Inc. (which makes M&M’s) for 38 years, and she met Kyle and his mom, Gaye, when they toured the facility two decades ago. She took a break from her job coloring M&M’s to meet them, which is just about perfect: She made M&M’s colorful and became a devotee of a driver who made NASCAR colorful.
Vickers and Gaye hit it off, and their friendship has grown through Kyle’s two championships, his marriage, the births of his two children, and now, his death.
Vickers learned the crushing news when Gaye called to tell her on Thursday. “I was bawling like a baby,” she says. “I couldn’t grasp it at all.”
Vickers’ heart was broken for Busch’s wife, Samantha; his children, Brexton and Lennix; his parents, Tom and Gaye; his brother, Kurt; and the sport she loves so much. That grief brought her to the race track, where she stood waiting, watching, mourning, just outside the metal fence that separates the garage area from the campground.
She had driven from her home in New Jersey to Charlotte in search of healing, relief from the pain. She hoped, no, she knew, she’d find it within the NASCAR community. To get it, there was something she needed to give, something she needed to get, and something she needed to share.
Love your enemies
At its best, most fascinating, most entertaining, the NASCAR industry is a traveling circus crossed with Lollapalooza, all set at a family reunion where half the people dislike the other half. There is nothing like it in the sports world, or even the broader culture, an insular nation with its own ethics (race him like he races you, the opposite of the Golden Rule), its own language (loose, tight, whoa’d up, etc.) and its own cultural standards (wrecking someone to win is wrong; unless you really want to win, then it’s fine).
The drivers can see each other as arch enemies. The stakes feel massive, and within the context of this self-contained NASCAR bubble, they are. It’s a zero-sum game. One driver wins, and all the rest lose. Millions of dollars hang in the balance. They fight for speed, they fight for sponsors, they fight for trophies and they fight because they get on each other’s nerves … all while living right next door to each other 38 weeks a year. If “normal” neighbors fought like that, one of them would move away. But in NASCAR, they move together.
And yet somehow, when tragedy strikes — as it has repeatedly in the last 13 months, with the sudden deaths of Hendrick Motorsports’ Jon Edwards, Denny Hamlin’s father, Dennis, Greg Biffle and Busch — NASCAR stops being a cutthroat sport and becomes a heartfelt community.
“It’s bad when you can’t get away from it. It’s good when you’ve got that to lean on,” says driver and team owner Brad Keselowski, who learned that lesson firsthand when his daughter had a life-threatening illness and the sport rallied around him. “There’s more support here just in terms of life than there is in other sports because of that community.”
Keselowski first saw the sport’s family dynamic through his relationship with his own brother, Brian. They fought like, well, like brothers. “Wait a minute,” Brad says. “At home, away from the race track, we’re damn near enemies, adversaries. But when someone else is mad at me, you’re going to defend me? It’s hard to rationalize.”
Hard, yes, and also beautiful.
That dichotomy provides a powerful source of comfort in NASCAR, a fact magnified this weekend. These drivers who just last weekend were trying to rip each other’s guts out were now hugging each other’s necks. “Life’s fragile. The people who you think are evil” — and here Keselowski laughed, as he doesn’t mean that word, not really, except he kind of does — “you find out they’re not.”
Jeff Burton, the former driver and current TV analyst who was elected to the NASCAR Hall of Fame last week, says being in the NASCAR community requires “a split personality.”
Burton said after Busch’s death several rough, tough “unbelievable bad asses” told him ‘I love you.’
“And I’ve said it to them, too,” he added.
Only the NASCAR garage fosters that kind of relationship.
“If you don’t have that mentality of I have to destroy you, you can’t exist,” Burton says. “But you have to find a way to take the helmet off, take the crew uniform off, and have compassion and care for someone. It’s very hard to do both.”
Sometimes the disdain is real.
Always the love is.
This weekend proved it.
Stories live on
At its best, most fascinating, most entertaining, NASCAR fandom is a traveling circus crossed with a high school beer bash crossed with a campground whose owners have completely given up on enforcing the rules because nobody follows them. Quiet hours are 2 p.m. until 2:01 p.m. unless you want to be loud then, too, in which case go ahead.
Like the driver community, the fan community comprises a unique, self-contained world. A neighborhood forms, disappears and reforms the next week as fans travel from race to race, just as the drivers do. The stakes are lower, of course, but NASCAR has thrived for 78 years because fan passion is real. Fans root for their heroes and rail against villains and share food, beer and laughs with fans of both.
And this week, all across the Charlotte Motor Speedway campground, they shared stories — stories about Kyle Busch and why they loved him, hated him and loved to hate him.
A Kyle Busch flag flew overhead as Steve Gordon cut and salted cantaloupe outside his refurbished 1969 school bus, painted white, in the same site near Turn 3 that he has occupied since the 1990s. He loved Busch because he loved Dale Earnhardt first, and it wasn’t lost on him that Busch’s loss is perhaps the biggest and most unexpected since Earnhardt.
In addition to tragic deaths, they had this in common: You always needed to know where each was on the track. If Busch was leading, you’d watch because a post-race victory bow and a zinger of a quote were coming. It was even better if he was deep in the field because he’d slice his way forward, part ballet dancer, part MMA fighter, and then the bow would be more dramatic, and the quote would be a double zinger.
Between Steve, his wife, Leslie, and their daughter, they own 40 Kyle Busch T-shirts. Leslie Gordon was shocked, crushed and confused when their daughter called to tell her the news. She’ll miss the way he pissed the whole of NASCAR off, and she’ll miss being delighted hearing people gripe about him. “I loved it when everybody booed Kyle,” she says. “That pumped me up. I was like, YEAH! Because they knew he was going to kick their ass.”
Over near Turn 4, Dominic Elliott stood under a Kyle Busch flag flying over his motorhome. He grew into his Busch fandom as Busch grew as a man and father. Elliott was there when Greg Moore died in 1999 at California Speedway, he was there when Dan Wheldon died in 2011 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and he lives in Statesville, North Carolina, and saw the smoke from Biffle’s fatal plane crash in December.
Elliott never considered not coming to the race. He, his wife and daughter instead wanted to be around people who love what they love. “It’s the only way to heal,” he said.
That healing came through stories. Grief makes you cry, grief makes you angry, and grief makes you laugh, and the stories about Busch make you do all three. He was lightning in a fire suit, a beast of a driver who fans loved and hated and for the same reasons: He was smirky, cocky, strutting and you were never quite sure when Kyle stopped and his alter ego Rowdy started or if they were really the same guy. He could slice you with a scalpel or pummel you with a sledgehammer, and either way he’d bow and you’d lose.
Vickers was eager to share her Busch stories. “First,” she said, “let me show you something.”
She pulled out her phone and scrolled through pictures. She skipped over one of her hugging Busch on stage after his first championship, kept going by another of her hugging him on stage after his second championship, zoomed right on by any number of pictures of them in any number of places.
Finally, she found the one she was looking for and held it up.
Taken two Friday nights ago, it showed her and Busch smiling broadly together in Victory Lane at Dover after the last of Busch’s unapproachable record of 234 national series wins.
Oh, the love Vickers has for the story behind that photo, and every other one on her phone. And, oh, how they make her sad to tell. Vickers’ stories about Busch sustain her now, and team owners, drivers, and other fans said the same thing.
In the garage and the campground, these stories were passed around all weekend, as if by sharing them the tellers could laugh at the memories instead of cry about the fact that there won’t be any more.
Daniel Suárez, whose Coca Cola 600 win was an emotional high point of the weekend, told one about an ass-chewing he received when he raced a truck owned by Busch. Team owner Joe Gibbs, for whom Busch won both of his championships, told of watching Busch grow as a man, husband and father and of what a pain Busch could be. NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell told one about Busch mocking NASCAR for making him go (unnecessarily, he thought) to the infield care center. He sprawled on a cart like a chalk outline. “I was mad at the time, but I look back, and that was damn funny,” O’Donnell said, a quote that just about everybody could have ended their stories with.
The stories will be told and retold today, tomorrow, and if conversations this weekend were any indication, for decades to come.
That’s what happens with legends.
The power of shared suffering
Only people we love can hurt us like this.
Ryan Blaney wore shock like a mask he couldn’t take off. William Byron said he didn’t want to get out of bed Saturday morning. Chase Briscoe drove to the track in an emotional fog as thick as the clouds that covered the track.
Like Vickers, Elliott and the Gordons, the drivers didn’t know what to do with their grief. They didn’t know how to process it, they couldn’t make sense of the dual facts that Kyle Busch won a Craftsman Truck Series race last Friday in Dover and tragically died the following Thursday.
It didn’t feel real in the garage.
It didn’t feel real in the campground.
The grief of drivers in the garage ran parallel to the grief of fans in the campground, just as their lives run parallel as they caravan from track to track. They were alone and yet together, telling the same stories, feeling the same fears, choking on the same emotions, separated only by the metal fence.
But as Darnette Vickers waited outside that metal fence, those parallel griefs converged, inched closer together, until they wrapped around each other like strands in a rope.
These two communities that rely on each other for their existence now rely on each other for healing.
Noah Gragson emerged from behind the metal fence riding a two-wheeled motorized scooter. Someone sitting on a golf cart mimed the motion to do a wheelie, and Gragson obliged by lifting up, leaning back and zooming away.
Vickers caught Gragson’s eye. She had met and befriended him when he drove for Kyle Busch Motorsports. He stopped his scooter next to her, leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her in a deep, full-bodied, heads-on-each-others-shoulders hug. They pulled back, looked each other in the eye, spoke for a minute, and hugged again.
Then Bubba Wallace, another former KBM driver, came out of the garage area. He signed a few autographs, and when he saw Vickers, he embraced her. She heaved as she rested her chin on his shoulder. He looked stricken as he held her tight.
They split up to stand at attention for the national anthem.
When it was over, they hugged more.
She walked away as if unburdened of a heavy weight, even if just momentarily, even if it would soon reattach itself to her. Maybe it would weigh a little less the next time, and still less the time after that.
She came to Charlotte Motor Speedway to give those hugs, to get hugged, to share her grief.
“The thing that saves me are the people that you saw me hug,” she says. “It also saves me that I have tons of beautiful memories from Kyle. In life, that’s what you want. People who know you, love you, care about you and want to help you heal as best you can.”
In the garage and the campground, she was surrounded by those people. Only people we love, who share our suffering, can heal us like this.
