Nearly a month after Kyle Busch's death, Tony Stewart unloaded on the way people reacted to the NASCAR star’s passing. Speaking ahead of an NHRA race, Stewart said what bothered him most was that “now everybody wants to talk about how he was as a person,” after, in his view, so many had spent years judging Busch only by what they saw on television.
That blunt response is why the comments are drawing attention now. Busch’s death had already prompted tributes, warnings, flashbacks, memories and stories at Charlotte Motor Speedway, where fans gathered for the first race since he died, but Stewart used the moment to push back against the softer posthumous praise. He made the remarks from Charlotte Motor Speedway, where correspondent Madison Scarpino reported, and he did not hide how personal the issue was for him as Busch’s former Joe Gibbs teammate.
Stewart said the problem was not just that people were talking about Busch now, but that they had not bothered to know him when it counted. “Outside of that, all they wanted to do is judge what they saw on TV,” he said, adding that people should have given Busch a chance to be known as a person before making up their minds. He said he did not care, at least right then, about “educating everybody about how Kyle Busch was.”
The criticism sharpened further when Stewart turned his anger toward those who waited until after Busch died to offer kind words. “The fact that they all want to learn now, they’re the a--holes for not taking the time to learn him and accept him for who he was back then,” he said, later adding that waiting until a driver dies and then caring about who he was “is the part that pisses me off about everybody.”
Busch, one of NASCAR’s most recognizable figures, had long been viewed through the lens of his on-track image. Stewart’s comments cut straight through that and left a harder question hanging over the flood of tributes: whether the sport and its fans are willing to see drivers as people while they are still here, not only after the memorials begin.
