The green No. 18 Toyota has its nose pressed right against the rear bumper of a white Camry pace car, light bar on the roof and “Official Pace Car” lettered down the side. The two cars roll along the outside wall at New Hampshire Motor Speedway like that, touching, for several seconds. Then the race car drops back, the pace car pulls ahead, and the camera follows both of them down a track that is still shining wet.

The driver is Kyle Busch, his name across the top of the windshield. The 12 second clip was posted on October 4, 2026, by the car culture page @hypewhip, which credits the footage to NASCAR in its caption. It is not new: the moment is from July 2021.

The page added a joke over the video. In quotation marks it imagines Busch noticing he has damaged the pace car’s bumper, with a censored word, and underneath, in italics, the punchline “rubs bumper into place.” The caption says Busch “made contact with the pace car hard enough to visibly damage its rear bumper.” The frames show the contact clearly; they are too small to show the damage.

What Happened That Day

The race was the Foxwoods Resort Casino 301 on Sunday, July 18, 2021. According to NASCAR’s race day report, Busch started from the pole and was leading six laps into the 301 lap race when rain started as the cars entered Turn 1. He wrecked from the lead. Rain fell harder soon after, and NASCAR threw the red flag three laps later. Everyone except Busch returned when the race restarted.

Two days later NASCAR reported there would be no penalty for Busch. That report says his No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota hit the outside wall with significant damage, that he made contact with the pace car while circling under yellow before parking on pit road, and that he finished last in the 37 car field. Teammates Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. also lost control in the same rain. Competition officials had said the pace car contact would be addressed in their weekly briefing, and no action followed.

Busch was blunt about the start. “We started the race under a mist,” he said, according to the same NASCAR report. “It never should have gone green to begin with, but then it kept getting worse and worse lap over lap.”

One commenter on the post summed up why fans still bring it up: NASCAR did not throw a caution for rain, Busch was the first to wreck in it, and he lost the lead and the race, so this was “his way of showing his displeasure to NASCAR.” That matches Busch’s own words at the time. Busch died on May 21, 2026, at age 41, according to NASCAR.

What Busch’s Crash Says About Driving in the First Rain

Busch hit the wall at a moment every driver knows: the first minutes of rain on a surface that was dry moments earlier. The physics that caught a polesitter on a closed track work the same way on a highway.

A thin film is enough. The Federal Highway Administration’s guidelines on wet weather speed management state that “even as little as 0.002 inches of water on the pavement can reduce the coefficient of friction by 20 to 30 percent.” That is far less water than a puddle.

Speed changes everything. The same FHWA guidance says that below about 20 mph the effect of water film thickness on friction is minimal, but above about 40 mph “the effect is more pronounced.” Highway speed is where the first rain bites hardest, so slow down before you feel the car slide.

Tires are your margin. FHWA notes that “worn, smooth, and ‘bald’ tires” are the most sensitive to water on the road, and the New York DMV’s driver’s manual says “Good tires with deep tread help to prevent hydroplaning.” Check your tread before the season changes, not after the first scare.

If the car starts to go, the New York manual says to decrease your speed even more when the vehicle begins to lose traction, and if the rear wheels skid, “turn the steering wheel in the direction the vehicle is trying to go.” Take extra care on curves, turns and ramps, which the manual singles out in rain.