NASCAR
Kyle Busch Is Fighting His Car and Social Media Critics This Weekend in Nashville
John Moriello started covering sports in 1982, began digital publishing in 1995, and joined Sportscasting in 2020. A graduate of St. John Fisher University, he finds inspiration in the underdogs and the fascinating stories sports can tell (both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat). John expertly covers all aspects of NASCAR. Beginning with his 2014 coverage at Fox Sports of the aftermath of the dirt-race tragedy in which Kevin Ward Jr. died after being struck by a car driven by NASCAR Hall of Famer Tony Stewart, John has excelled as a journalist who specializes in the motorsports world. He previously spent more than three decades covering high school sports and worked as a beat writer covering Big East football and basketball, but NASCAR is now where the true expertise falls. John is a member of the New York State Basketball Hall of Fame (2013), the President of the New York State Sportswriters Association, and a two-time Best of Gannett winner for print and online collaborations whose work has appeared on FoxSports.com and MaxPreps.com.
Get to know John Moriello betterPublished25 Jun 2022
It’s not easy looking more petty (and we’re not talking Richard and Kyle here) than Kyle Busch some days, but Twitter users seem to make it a challenge to get there.
The start of the second half of the NASCAR Cup Series season brought the drivers to Nashville, the immature to Twitter, and the No. 18 Toyota to the garage for emergency repairs.
It’s just another weekend in the life of the future Hall of Famer.
The keyboard warriors descend upon Kyle Busch
Kyle Busch is intimately familiar with that expression about no good deed going unpunished. In true Rowdy fashion, however, he isn’t one to take the punishment sitting down.
With the NASCAR Cup series rolling into Nashville after a week off, Busch set up an appearance at an area Walmart to promote the Rowdy Energy line of products. As part of it, the two-time Cup Series champion arranged to sign autographs for the first 100 people responding to the event.
Now, we should point out here that, as much as some racing fans despise the driver, he is popular with a large segment of the crowd. Thus, he tends to attract a crowd, so 100 autographs might have been too few. Had the folks pulling the event together been thinking, they might have splurged for running off 224 color prints.
That would reflect his 224 career wins in the three national series. By signing and numbering them, he would have been presenting the lucky fans with a keepsake. Better yet, he could have signed 225 of them, showing some trademark cockiness by implying he planned to win on Sunday.
Alas, cutting off the number of autographs at 100 on a day when he had to get to the track for practice ticked off a keyboard warrior. And you can just sense that keyboard is located in mom’s basement.
Kyle Busch returns fire as only Kyle Busch can
Naturally, someone fired up his Twitter account, where the access is cheap and the talk is cheaper. A user with all of 101 followers barked at Kyle Busch:
“Richard Petty would have stayed until anyone who wanted an autograph got one~ Just signing for the first 100 people is a bigger jerk move than when you smashed the Sam Bass guitar~”
Busch plowed his windshield into that bug at 150 mph with his response:
“Cool. I’ll just stay and sign autographs for 5000+ people and miss practice at 5pm. U should b my publicist so u can tell my team that my job isn’t as important as signing autographs is.”
Kyle Busch
Of course, another Twitter critic, this one with 88 followers and a bio entry calling pro wrestling “the most real thing in my life,“ felt obliged to jump in, telling Busch: “lol crybaby kyle at it again.”
That was easy pickings for Busch.
“Your bio tells me all I need to know,” he fired back.
There may have been some karma at work in Saturday’s qualifying
You could practically hear the cackle of the Kyle Busch haters on Saturday during qualifying for Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race. While Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin was earning the pole position with a lap of 160.413 mph that edged Joey Logano, Busch didn’t complete his lap.
The No. 18 Toyota didn’t hold its line coming out of Turn 3 and backed into the outside wall. That will send Busch to the back of the field for the Ally 400.
Like Sportscasting on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter @sportscasting19 and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
