Kyle Busch spent most of his career getting booed. He was loud, unapologetic, and won constantly. That combination made him one of the most polarizing drivers the sport has ever had. Now when he’s gone, NASCAR is still figuring out how to mark the silence he left behind. Former team owner Tommy Baldwin Jr. thinks he has the right idea: name the Truck Series championship trophy after Busch.
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“I’d love to see the Truck Series championship trophy named after Kyle Busch,” Baldwin said on the Door Bumper Clear podcast. “We should be celebrating his life and everything he’s accomplished in our sport because he’s done a lot for a lot of people.”
Baldwin is not just a talking head. He ran Tommy Baldwin Racing in the Cup Series for years before selling his charter to Leavine Family Racing in 2016, and he now owns a short-track Modified team that’s won the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour Owner’s Championship. He knows what it takes to leave a lasting mark on the sport, and his case for Busch rests on numbers that are hard to argue with.
Busch raced in 184 Truck Series events and won 69 of them, a win rate above 37%, meaning he won more than one of every three truck races he ever entered. Nobody else in the series’ history comes close. He passed Ron Hornaday Jr.’s long-standing win record and kept building on it. His final race came at Dover on May 15, a Truck Series win just six days before his death.
That win rate is only part of what made Busch central to the division. He also ran Kyle Busch Motorsports, which became the sport’s premier Truck Series operation, winning Owner’s Championships in 2015 and 2017 and pulling in corporate money and factory support that forced every other team in the garage to raise its own game just to compete.
More than the results, KBM became a pipeline into the Cup Series itself. Christopher Bell won the 2017 Truck title out of that shop. Erik Jones won in 2015. William Byron, Bubba Wallace, and John Hunter Nemechek all came up through the same organization. Look at today’s Cup Series grid, and a real share of it traces back to what Busch built.
That’s the same logic behind most of the sport’s biggest trophies. The Vince Lombardi Trophy carries Lombardi’s name because he built something no one could ignore. Baldwin’s argument for Busch follows the same reasoning, someone whose imprint on a series went well beyond his own results on the track.
A Sport Pausing to Remember Kyle Busch
The Charlotte Celebration of Life on October 9 is the centerpiece, but the tributes started immediately after Kyle Busch passed on May 21, 2026. He was 41. A sinus infection became bacterial pneumonia, then sepsis, then hemorrhagic shock. It moved fast, and it shocked everyone.
NASCAR pulled his name off the active Cup Series standings, in consultation with Richard Childress Racing, so his family would not have to watch it sink down the leaderboard every week. RCR parked the No. 8 for the rest of the season and switched to the No. 33.
They have also informally set the No. 8 aside for Kyle Busch’s 11-year-old son Brexton, whenever he gets there. At Indianapolis 500 weekend, Romain Grosjean switched his IndyCar entry to No. 18, the number Busch carried through both of his Cup championships. Drivers across the garage are running “Rowdy” on their namerails for the rest of 2026.
USA TODAY Sports put together a commemorative hardcover called Forever Rowdy: The Legacy of Hard-Driving Kyle Busch, covering 234 wins across NASCAR’s top three series. It retails for $39.95 and will be at the Charlotte memorial in October.
Baldwin put it best. “It’s crazy because everyone used to get so aggravated. Even the fans would boo him. Now that’s probably going to end up being one of the most iconic things that will last forever.”
He was right about that too.
Baldwin’s proposal remains just that for now, an idea raised on a podcast rather than something NASCAR has formally addressed. The next real test of how far these tributes go comes October 9, when NASCAR hosts a public Celebration of Life for Busch at Charlotte Motor Speedway, immediately following that week’s Truck Series race, the same series Baldwin wants to carry Busch’s name permanently. The event is free and open to the public, with additional details on speakers and format still to be announced.