Day in the Life of a NASCAR Driver at Talladega: Kyle Busch

Here we are in Talladega, Alabama. Just landed with Samantha and Lennox. Getting ready for the qualifying day today. Obviously the race tomorrow. 24 hours of Talladega with Kyle Busch. Hey everybody, what's up? Home away from home, this is what it's like living on the road. Always traveling, always somewhere every different weekend. We've got to roll in style a little bit with the Motorhomes. We're in the Motorhome lot, traveling circus. Come on in, check ours out. Living in style inside the living room. Here we are. When we buy stuff in the beginning of the year, you're like, okay, we need eight toothbrushes. Four are going home, four are coming here, right? Yeah, my rule is no suitcases. You've got a bus, you've got a closet, you've got everything that you need on here. It's home away from home. We travel light, we go with backpacks only. That's pretty much it. And everything that you see in here is storage. We've got books galore. Every single cabinet is stuffed to the brim because we spend a lot of time here. Business station for the adults. So coming over here, sitting in my chair, my work chair. I've got my little pull-out desk. Get some laptop work done, things like that, emails. I'll show him the kitchen since this is not your specialty. You know what I cook? Mac and cheese. And then he leaves the stove top on. No, no, no, no, no. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So over here, it's a fully functioning kitchen, which is great. And so really a lot of times, unless we're somewhere where we're staying in a hotel, we pretty much eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner right here. This is my favorite perch for when it's time to come eat. I like to sit on this side as I can get my chance of watching the big screen TV. But we added in the other TV right here so the folks sitting on this side, Samantha and Lennox, they get a chance to watch whatever we're watching as well too while we eat. Can we be good parents? So we typically don't have the TV on while we're eating unless it's racing. Over here, you've got your fridge, sodas, milks, fruits, veggies, cheeses, meats, everything you need to make a sandwich. One of Samantha's closets here. One of many. All I get is one side of the vanity with all my stuff and then one drawer. Everything else is for Samantha. You're lucky you have that one drawer. Yeah, I'm lucky I got one drawer. This is one of my most spent times of the bus. Murphy-style bed. Workout equipment down here. Don't mind the fire suit for the weekend. This is the bunk area. So you've got Brexton's bunk. Brexton's not here. His bedroom gets the storage area. And then Lennox has her little crib area here as well too. Notice the baby gate. She tends to enjoy getting out in the middle of the night or maybe too early in the morning. So she knows when she's in, she's in. That keeps us being able to get a full night's rest and being able to sleep as much as we can. That's it, man. Got a full tour of the bus. This is how we roll. This is a little different than a normal week. For a one-lap qualifying, we've kind of already done all our adjustments. The car's already ready for qualifying trim. So hopefully we just put tires on it, get it warmed up, and that'll be it. Looking at vitals, just watching gauges, watching the numbers, just watching everything operate, just making sure everything's working properly. Tomorrow we'll kind of work some of those qualifying adjustments back out of it, get it back in race trim, which we'll do some more things there, raise the car back up, stuff like that. I would say what makes Talladega one of the more unique racetracks on the circuit is obviously its size. It's the biggest racetrack that we have on the circuit. This place is going to be booming with people, and so everybody just loves to come to Talladega and have a great time. Okay, I see some flags laying out here. The American flags, the number eight flag. Show me a flag. Being around for as long as I have, with 20 years' experience, you just go with the flow, you know? Everything just kind of runs like clockwork. You've got a schedule, you live to the schedule, and if it's not on the schedule, it pretty much doesn't happen. So they'll send us out single file, and then whoever the fastest 10 are, they move to the second round. You get five minutes, cool the engines back down, hopefully we're in that, and go for the pole. What line do I need to run? Not the middle. Depends if you want to be done early or not. No, we need to be, we need all we can get. Before you launch, just give it like 4,500 for like 10 seconds. All right, so we just got through our first qualifying run. So far so good. We're still a little bit more speed. We'll jump all the way to the top, try to get this pole for the day. Thanks to ECR and RCR Bunch, we always come to the Speedways with good speed. So, you know, we qualified second here in the spring, I guess third today, so I wouldn't call that easy. I know there's a lot of hard work in it behind the scenes, but my job is easy, so it looks good right now. Hey, Daddy. Yo. Can we have her tiara and gloves? Look at Lanny. Show Daddy all your sparkles. Yay! You got all the colors tonight, honey. There's blue, there's green, there's red. You're very festive. You know, being here in Talladega, it's pretty cool with the kids and everything that you get to do family-wise and being able to go out there and trick-or-treat, take a load off, just kind of enjoy the weekend. And once it comes to race time and you get into race mode, that's when you're out on the grid and you're strapping in your race car and you're getting ready to go. So for me being around as long as I am, you can separate those pretty well and it comes second nature. Here we are, day two at Talladega Motor Speedway, getting ready for race day. It's a little weathery right now. We had some weather in the area last night. Still a little bit misty right now. We're trying to keep the track dry, as dry as possible for the moment. But hey, it's 9 a.m. and we're ready to get rolling. So Chevy meeting is first up. We've got a lot of things that we go over in the Chevy meeting. I can't take you guys in there with me. We're going to get everything going right now. Today before Talladega, we get some food inside of us and then we check the box up. Top set up, get the bottom nice and cleaned up for the guests. Everything we do is based around our speed. Whether it's setting the box up or turning the box down or pit stops or assisting the driver, everything we do is speed. That's the heart of our team. You have to be perfect within a matter of seconds. 8.5 seconds to be exact is how long we have to be perfect. It's almost impossible, but we, as pit crew guys, try to do that. Qualifying yesterday, I think you had a pretty decent balance. You had a little bit of speed in the car. Balance was good. I felt like the turn 3 bumps were maybe a little bit on the rougher side, but I think that will mostly clean up with the adjustments that we normally do before the race, so I'm not too worried about that. Hopefully we've got enough pace in the car that you can stay up there and get our fuel mileage so we can get in our windows. Right. So we're not racing each other? We're racing separate races? Yes. Okay, gotcha. Well, I just really want to direct these guys, so... It's not going anywhere! Roughly 45 minutes to an hour before the race, we all start coming out here. We either start to stretch. I got to start working on my gun. I'll hit some practice patterns here. Just kind of get a feel for my gun, clean all the teeth, make sure it's ready to go. We stack all of our tires up. I go over my jacks again, make sure our banner looks good, make sure everything looks good for the appearance. When the green flag drops after National Anthem, all that stuff, we're ready to go. Just stretching it out, brother. Making sure that everything's warmed up and has a blood flow before I get going. I'd like to officially welcome you to Talladega Super Speedway. Thank you all for being with us here on race day. Driving the number eight Chevrolet, two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, Kyle Moratti Bush! So Talladega being one of the biggest racetracks we have, being a super speedway, you reach max speed, probably 200, 205 miles an hour down the back stretch into turn three and cars inches away from each other, and you don't ever know what's coming next, what's around the next turn. Even on the straightaways, we tend to crash when we're going straight. 30, 36 guys, all of us out there, we all have a shot to win the race. It's just all about destiny and how it all kind of comes through and puts you in the lead when it matters most. We're on the grid, and I know that this racetrack is a fan favorite, but it is not a wife favorite. Definitely the high speeds, the racks, it makes you super nervous. This is just one of those tracks where all morning your stomach's in a knot because you just never know what's going to happen. Kyle's obviously won here before, and it'd be great to get a little miss in victory lane, right? What do you do in victory lane? You got it, girl. What's Kyle's name? Amen. Go get him. Love you. Give your daddy a big kiss. Love you. Let's go get some lunch and nap. It's the Yellowwood 500 and a packed house here in Alabama. Let's go! There is nothing like that roar. Rebel turn number four, here comes the feel as it flies apart. Cars hitting the wall on the outside with a major pileup in turn number four. Today's race was really good. We had a great race car. At speed, you know, you just got to have the right luck and the right circumstances to kind of go your way, and that sort of is always our downfall. It's our downfall to Talladega of just not having enough help at the end in order to make something happen to get there to win the race. But that's it for Talladega. Appreciate you all tagging along with us for the weekend. Like, subscribe. We'll see you on the next go-round.