NASCAR champion admits Kyle Busch wanted to 'rip his head off' in intense rivalry reveal

2014 NASCAR Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick has said that Kyle Busch wanted to rip his head off at times during his racing days and that the feeling was mutual.

Harvick called time on his Cup career at the end of the 2023 season but had previously raced in NASCAR's elite series since 2001.

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This largely overlaps with the career of Busch, who first raced in the Cup Series in 2004, and naturally, with the two having an enormous amount of talent, they struck up a very competitive rivalry at the front of the field over the years.

On a recent episode of his Happy Hour show, Harvick revealed that he and Busch are now 'social friends', but also touched on the intensity of their relationship across all three NASCAR national series.

Speaking to Joe Gibbs, one of Busch's former bosses, Harvick admitted that both he and Busch wanted to rip each other's heads off at times, but feels like their rivalry made them better drivers.

“Kyle and I are social friends here and there, not quite like Tony [Stewart],” Harvick explained.

“But I appreciated the competition that was always presented with Kyle Busch because it was in Trucks, Xfinity, and Cup, and it didn’t matter what you were racing.”

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Harvick: Busch and I wanted to rip each other's heads off

Harvick continued: “He wanted to rip my head off, and I wanted to rip his head off,”

“And I wanted to beat him bad, and he wanted to beat me bad.

"It went through those years of just that head-to-head competition that just made us better racers.”

One time that the pair's rivalry got physical was at Darlington in 2011, when Harvick climbed out of his car on pit road after the race and threw a punch at Busch as he attempted to drive away.

"I recall my shoulder still hurting because as I went in to punch him in the head, he decided to take off in his car," Harvick said in a 2024 interview.

"Right here, he knew he was going to get punched in the head," Harvick said while re-watching the run-in with Busch. "He decided that, ‘I'm not going to get punched in the head."

After the incident, the pair were even summoned to the NASCAR trailer, along with their team owners.

"We went up in the trailer — and Kyle and I had been in the trailer a lot together over instances — but that night, I'll never forget it, because that was one of those nights that Joe Gibbs and Richard [Childress] had to go to the trailer, as well, because they were supposed to be in charge of their drivers," Harvick continued.

"And Joe Gibbs said something, and I said something back. Joe actually wrote me a letter after that meeting of just, ‘Hey, this, this and this.'

"It's funny how those types of things happen and lead to new conversations about who you are, what you are, whatever that conversation is about. It was just a very intense conversation."

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