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Samantha Busch on how NASCAR families are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic
For The Win spoke with Samantha Busch, who’s married to Kyle Busch, about racing and life during the COVID-19 crisis.
If Kyle Busch is racing, his wife, Samantha Busch, is always at the track, intensely watching (and sometimes live-tweeting) from the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota team’s pit box.
But since the COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season and led to limited people at the track, Samantha has been forced to anxiously watch most races from home with their 5-year-old son, Brexton.
To return to racing in May after a 10-week hiatus this spring, NASCAR put several precautions in place to keep what’s considered essential personnel — like crew members and NASCAR and track officials — safe at the track. The governing body, however, is not testing teams for COVID-19.
For The Win recently spoke with Samantha — who was promoting Walmart Family Mobile — about what life has been like for NASCAR families as racing continues during the pandemic and how she and Kyle have stayed busy.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What have the last few months been like for you as a family? Have you found you’re spending more time together?
It was kind of cool: We got to hang out with [Kyle’s older brother] Kurt and Ashley on [July 4th] before the boys flew up to the race [in Indianapolis], so it’s really rare to have these weekends at home.
And I will say, we are definitely making the most out of it. We’ve been doing a lot of house projects and hanging out together, and Brexton started racing a little bit here and there so that’s taken up a lot of time. We’ve, of course, stayed busy, but we’re having a lot of fun.
Brexton is racing already?
He’s not racing yet. It’s like a mini sprint car thing. [Kyle Larson’s son] Owen’s doing it too so we haven’t really raced yet. He went out on the track for the first time [recently]. And actually, Greg Ives, Alex Bowman’s crew chief, has been helping him out. He’s got a little boy, Parker, who races them, so he’s been letting us borrow Parker’s stuff just to see if Brexton likes it.
Wooo, it’s a whole new level of anxiety. He just turned five, and we asked him what he wanted to do, and he said he wanted to start racing.
Aside from not traveling to races while Kyle still is, how has life been different for you?
You know I love being there. I think that there is such an energy that comes with being at the track and seeing the fans. You know, the sights the sounds, the smells of being out there. So that’s been a little bit hard.
I feel like we just get to watch on TV now, and there’s that extra level of anxiety of not being there, especially at places like Talladega and whatnot.
How do you manage that anxiety, especially when they’re racing at places known for crazy wrecks like Talladega or Daytona?
You know Kyle and all the boys — no fear. But we FaceTime with Kyle before the race. We do our standard prayer that we would do out on pit road. We talk to him right before he goes out there, which is also why it’s awesome to partner with Walmart Family Mobile.
Do the three of you pray before every race?
Yeah, we try to hop on the call right before and say a nice little prayer. If not, then the night before, with Brexton before bed, and that’s the thing we’ve always done before races. Trying to at least keep that tradition alive even if we can’t be there.
Are you concerned about Kyle regularly traveling back and forth between home and the tracks right now?
No, not really. He’s mostly just traveling with Kurt, so we’ve obviously been able to see family during all of this. They’re staying safe, taking every precaution. We’ve got hand sanitizer, multiple masks, social distancing, so he’s been really good about all of that.
And it’s great that NASCAR was able to go back, and they have so many safety precautions there that we completely get it. But man, just ready for this virus to go away and for life to get back to normal.
Overall, how would you describe what life has been like for NASCAR families during the pandemic?
A lot of us have been fortunate, we’ve seen them a lot more than normal because there are such restrictions to stay at home. I was talking to Lorra Bowyer, and [her and Clint Bowyer’s son] Cash and Brex miss going so much. They would just love playing in the motorhome lots and being out on pit road and seeing all the guys.
Every weekend, Brexton asks, “OK, can I go back to the track this week?” So I think that’s been pretty difficult because we’re adults, we understand. But for kids like Brex and Cash, they’ve been on the road their entire lives, so it’s a little bit harder for them to understand.
What was your reaction to Jimmie Johnson initially testing positive for COVID, and did that impact your feelings about Kyle traveling so much?
No, for the most part, he’s been really good. He literally goes from the rental car to the motorhome straight into the car, and we’ve been taking a lot of precautions as a family at home. It’s just so hard to understand and know anything going on.
Back up in northwest Indiana, my aunt and uncle and grandpa and cousin all just got it, and they’re like, “We haven’t even really left the house.” So it’s a new time that everyone is navigating, and I swear, we just cover ourselves in hand sanitizer every few minutes.
Are you family members feeling OK?
A bunch of them tested positive but no symptoms whatsoever. We’re just doing everything we can to stay away and stay by family and keep to ourselves. … It was scary, but they’re like, “We feel perfectly fine.”
You mentioned some house projects. What have you guys been up to?
I would say Day 3 of quarantine, Kyle and I realized we’re not good at sitting around. So we decided to repaint the whole basement, which then, of course, turned into redoing the backsplash and all this other stuff. And because we didn’t want a lot of people in, we’ve just been slowly doing it ourselves.
[The backsplash] my dad is helping with, but Kyle and I have learned what we’re good at when it comes to painting. I’m the taping, the sanding and the first-coater, but he’s the main coater and toucher-upper. So it’s been fun.
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Kyle Busch silences his critics with second NASCAR title: ‘This one feels like the first’
“You know Kyle likes to prove people wrong,” Samantha Busch said about Kyle.
HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Kyle Busch couldn’t help but make a sarcastic joke.
“Oh, I won a full-time championship? What do you know?” he said after winning the second NASCAR Cup Series championship of his career Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Busch earned his first title in 2015, but his biggest critics in NASCAR’s fan base said he was not worthy of winning and still question the legitimacy of it because he missed the first 11 races of that Cup season after breaking his right leg and fracturing his left foot in a wreck during the closing laps of the season-opening second-tier XFINITY Series race at Daytona International Speedway.
He didn’t compete in nearly a third of the 2015 season, but NASCAR granted him a waiver allowing him to still be championship eligible. And then he won it all.
“This is great because that always did bother Kyle a little bit,” Samantha Busch, Kyle’s wife, told For The Win and two other media outlets Sunday as the family celebrated his second title. “People were like, ‘That wasn’t real. You didn’t run all the races. It doesn’t count.’ So, now what? He ran all the races this year. He was the regular season’s points champion. …
“It always had a little star by it, I think, for him, so I think this one’s going to take time to set in, and he’s gonna know he did it.”
Busch and the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota team not only won the 2019 title, but they also won the Ford EcoBoost 400 when they only had to finish higher than the other championship hopefuls. Martin Truex Jr. finished second, while Kevin Harvick was fourth and Denny Hamlin 10th.
This season, Busch competed in all 36 races and won five. But there are still some peculiar similarities to his 2015 championship run, specifically his winless streaks leading up to victories at Homestead. It all feels “awfully familiar,” he said.
Five years ago after Busch returned from his injuries, he won four-of-five races between June and July, and then he went on a 15-race winless streak until he took the checkered flag in the championship race. Getting off to a comparably hot start, though healthy, he won three-of-five early on — including his 200th win across NASCAR’s three national series — a fourth in June and then rode a 21-race winless streak into Homestead.
“It felt a lot like 2015 to me, aside from the broken leg, obviously,” crew chief Adam Stevens said.
“[We] had a couple races get away from us,” he said, comparing the two championship seasons. “But it wasn’t because we weren’t fast. It wasn’t because we weren’t prepared. They just didn’t go our way.”
— Kyle Busch (@KyleBusch) November 17, 2019
Despite being one of the most talented drivers on the track, the winless streak led to Busch being perceived as the underdog against Truex, Hamlin and Harvick, who all won at least one playoff race.
In another similarity to 2015, Samantha said people overlooked her husband in both championship seasons, first because he missed so many races and then because he went more than five months without a trip to Victory Lane.
“You know Kyle likes to prove people wrong,” she said. “I think he took that, internalized it [and] used it to fuel him instead of bring him back.”
A second career championship elevates Busch’s resume to another elite level. He joins seven-time champ Jimmie Johnson as the only active driver with more than one title. He now has 56 career wins, moving him into ninth on the all-time wins list.
This season and its championship finish “certainly reminded” Busch of his 2015 run, he said with a chuckle. Only this time, no one can question it.
“This one feels like the first,” he said. “But getting into next year being two-time is going to be cool. I’m certainly looking forward to that.”
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