Ty Gibbs will arrive at Bristol Motor Speedway carrying more than a special paint scheme. His car will wear an M&M’s tribute to Kyle Busch, the 23-time Bristol winner, while Gibbs continues to support Busch’s 11-year-old son, Brexton, through the loss of his father’s NASCAR career and the upheaval that followed.

That support has taken on a particularly personal meaning because Gibbs knows what it is like for a young person to lose a father. His own dad, Coy Gibbs, died in 2022, shortly after Ty won the NASCAR Xfinity Series championship. The circumstances were utterly different, but grief has a way of ignoring tidy comparisons. It recognizes itself in other people.

A Young Driver Taking on an Older-Brother Role

Samantha Busch recently explained that Gibbs has been one of the people consistently present for Brexton in recent months. She described him as being like a “big brother” to her son, a strikingly warm description in a sport more accustomed to discussing tire wear, restart zones and whether somebody’s right-rear is about to surrender.

The relationship makes sense within NASCAR’s unusually close family structure. Gibbs grew up around Joe Gibbs Racing, where his grandfather Joe founded one of the sport’s most successful organizations and Coy served as president. Brexton, meanwhile, has spent his life around racing through Kyle and Samantha Busch. These are not casual paddock acquaintances. Their families have shared garages, airplanes, race weekends and the peculiar pressures that come with growing up in public around a professional sport.

Gibbs is also close enough in age to understand Brexton’s world without pretending to be an adult therapist in a fire suit. He can offer company, familiarity and a sense that life inside racing still contains something normal. That may sound modest. For a child dealing with a major family change, it can be enormously valuable.

Why Gibbs Understands the Shape of That Grief

Coy Gibbs died in November 2022 at the age of 49, just hours before Ty was due to compete for the Xfinity Series championship. Ty went on to win the title at Phoenix Raceway, but the achievement was inseparable from the tragedy surrounding it.

There is no useful scoreboard for grief, and no championship trophy makes it disappear. Ty was still a young man trying to process the death of his father while fulfilling an enormous professional obligation. That experience gives him a perspective most people in the NASCAR garage would never want to acquire.

It also explains why his presence for Brexton is more meaningful than a routine show of support from a fellow driver. Gibbs does not need to be told that children can be surrounded by adults, cameras and well-meaning conversation while still feeling profoundly alone. He has lived through the strange disconnect between public attention and private pain.

That shared understanding does not mean Gibbs can remove Brexton’s grief. Nobody can. But he can be there, answer questions when he has answers, provide a familiar face at the track and help preserve the connection between Brexton and the racing community that has shaped his family.

An M&M’s Tribute at Bristol

The visual expression of that connection will come at Bristol, where Gibbs will run a special M&M’s livery in tribute to Kyle Busch. The choice of location is hardly accidental. Busch has won 23 times at Bristol, making the Tennessee short track one of the clearest parts of his NASCAR identity.

Bristol is a fitting venue for a Busch tribute because the track has always suited his particular brand of controlled aggression. The steeply banked half-mile circuit is compact, loud and thoroughly unforgiving. Drivers run close enough to exchange paint without needing a particularly ambitious stretch of imagination. A race there can turn into a mechanical argument conducted at 130 mph, usually with several thousand people cheering from the grandstands.

Busch’s success at Bristol was built across multiple NASCAR divisions, but the number remains a remarkable marker of his relationship with the track. An M&M’s scheme there also carries historical weight because the colorful brand became one of the most recognizable liveries in the Cup Series during Busch’s time with Joe Gibbs Racing.

Mars, the parent company of M&M’s, ended its NASCAR sponsorship after the 2022 season. That decision closed one of the sport’s most familiar chapters. For years, the bright red, yellow and green characters were part of the visual language of NASCAR, as instantly recognizable as the cars themselves. Their disappearance left a particularly obvious gap on Busch’s No. 18 Toyota.

Could M&M’s Return to NASCAR?

Gibbs has also discussed the possibility of M&M’s returning to NASCAR, although hope and a confirmed sponsorship deal are very different creatures. The source of that hope is obvious: the brand remains deeply associated with the sport, Busch remains a major figure in its recent history, and fans have not exactly filed the old livery away under “things nobody remembers.”

Still, sponsorship decisions are business decisions, not nostalgia contests. A company must weigh audience reach, marketing priorities, cost and the value of being visible across an entire season. Even a beloved racing partnership cannot be revived merely because a large number of fans would enjoy seeing the candy characters back on the quarter panels.

That is why a one-off tribute is important. It allows NASCAR, Gibbs and the Busch family to acknowledge what M&M’s meant without pretending that a single special livery confirms a full-time return. The car can celebrate the past while leaving the commercial future unresolved.

A Tribute With Two Stories Running Through It

For fans, the Bristol car will naturally be read as a tribute to Kyle Busch and his extraordinary record at the track. For Gibbs and the Busch family, it carries another layer. The driver inside the car is someone who has been trying to help Brexton navigate a difficult period, and someone whose own experience has made him unusually aware of how much quiet support can matter.

Gibbs is still building his own Cup Series career. He is not Kyle Busch, nor is he being asked to imitate him. The M&M’s scheme is a salute, not a transfer of identity. Yet NASCAR is full of these overlapping personal and professional histories: fathers, sons, team owners, sponsors, mentors and young drivers inheriting both opportunity and loss.

The most meaningful part of this story may happen away from the grandstands. It may be a conversation in a garage, a familiar presence at a race or simply Gibbs making sure Brexton knows he has not been forgotten. The tribute car will be visible to everyone. The support behind it will be much quieter.

That is fitting. Racing has never been short of noise. Sometimes the important things happen in the spaces between it.