Dale Earnhardt Jr. revealed his final text exchange with the late Kyle Busch hours before the NASCAR driver’s death.
“I was texting with him the day before he passed away about getting together this Thursday to bring his seat for his late model over to my shop,” Earnhardt Jr., 51, said during the Tuesday, May 26, episode of “The Dale Jr. Download” podcast. “We had agreed that he was going to race our car in the CARS Tour.”
The CARS Racing Tour is a stock car racing organization that features late model race cars. Both Earnhardt Jr. and the late Busch discussed which number car they would run for the tour.
“He’s texting me, and he’s like, ‘What scheme we going to run?’ And I was like, ‘You can run any scheme you want.’ I was like, ‘What number do you want to run?’” Earnhardt Jr. continued. “He goes … he said it, literally, ‘The Dale Jr. 8.’ I was like, ‘You got it.’”
Earnhardt Jr. said that Busch sent him an exploding head emoji, adding that’s what “race fans” would look like when seeing him run the old model. (Earnhardt Jr. raced the Budweiser-sponsored No. 8 car for nine seasons from 1999 to 2007.)
Earnhardt Jr. also got emotional when discussing Busch’s death, saying that it was “extremely” difficult to believe that the athlete had died.
“What I’ve enjoyed, I guess, is learning more about Kyle the person,” Earnhardt Jr. added. “We know who he is on the race track, we know how he is on the race track and in the media, and so forth. What he was like at the track with the suit on and in that environment. I knew him on a personal level.”
He continued, “But hearing how he interacted and how he was to others, the joke they may have shared in a text … I’ve really enjoyed learning who he was away from the track and how he interacted and engaged, or treated, or talked to other people, and it’s been good.”
News broke on Thursday, May 21, that Busch was hospitalized with a “severe illness.” Hours later, NASCAR confirmed that he had died at age 41. Busch’s cause of death was released days later, revealing that he died of pneumonia that progressed “into sepsis, resulting in rapid and overwhelming associated complications.”
Earnhardt Jr. initially remembered his longtime opponent in a lengthy social media statement, calling the late Busch “one of the greatest drivers in NASCAR history” on Thursday.
“Kyle and I had a really challenging existence for many years. But we luckily took the time to figure out our differences and that was something he instigated with a conversation in his bus around how we each managed our racing team,” he shared via X, in part. “I was super eager for us to get on better terms. But it was he who made the effort for that to be possible.”
