Tony Stewart publicly tore into those he says rushed to re-evaluate Kyle Busch only after the driver’s death, saying the chatter that followed was not genuine and that many who now praise Busch never tried to know him in life. "I guess the biggest thing in this tragedy that’s happened that pisses me off the most is that now everybody wants to talk about how he was as a person," Stewart said ahead of this weekend’s NHRA race.
Stewart did not soften his language. He accused vast swaths of observers of forming opinions from television images alone. "Outside of that, all they wanted to do is judge what they saw on TV. It’s frustrating," he said, and added that he already knew Busch well enough to have no interest in educating the public: "So, right now, I don’t care about educating everybody about how Kyle Busch was. I know how Kyle Busch was."
The comments landed as NASCAR fans gathered for the first race since Busch’s death, an atmosphere of tributes and flashbacks that a correspondent, Madison Scarpino, reported from Charlotte Motor Speedway. Nearly a month after the shock that shook the sport, Stewart’s words became one of the clearest moments of public pushback against the wave of posthumous reassessment sweeping NASCAR news and social feeds.
Stewart’s familiarity with Busch was visible as well as verbal: the two were photographed together before the Daytona 500 on Feb. 17, 2008, and again before the Pure Michigan 400 on Aug. 16, 2015. That history underpins the bluntness of his remarks: "That’s the way every one of us are judged by what they see on TV and then once you die, they want to talk about how good a person you were," he said.
The sharpest line came when Stewart put the moral burden on those who stayed on the sidelines until after Busch’s death. "Should’ve given him a chance to learn him as a person before they judged him in the first place," he said, and finished: "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."
That denunciation contains a contradiction that many in and around the sport will notice: Stewart condemned people for judging Busch from television, while the crowd he spoke of—fans at the Charlotte race and millions watching from home—had largely experienced Busch through exactly that filtered lens of broadcasts, highlights and social clips. The friction raises a simple question Stewart did not answer: was his target the casual fan, the media, fellow competitors, or some combination of all three?
Stewart framed his anger as personal and principled rather than performative. He rejected the idea of posthumous correction for an image he says was never accurate, and he pushed back on the notion that public sentiment after a death is the same as real understanding. "You want to wait until a guy dies and then care about who he was as a person is the part that pisses me off about everybody," he said.
His outburst is the clearest new development in this thread of NASCAR news: a prominent veteran driver and team owner publicly naming as hypocrites those who now speak warmly of Busch. But Stewart did not single out specific groups or name individual critics, and there has been no clear rebuttal from others in the sport. He made the remarks ahead of the NHRA race and left the conversation with an unresolved center — who, precisely, did he mean, and will anyone step forward to answer him before the weekend is over?
