Kyle Busch Just Won a Maine Moose Hunting Permit, Which Is a Hell of a Way to Find Out He's Been Gone a Month
Bureaucracy, as a rule, does not read the obituaries. The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife proved that beautifully over the weekend when it announced the winners of its 2026 Moose Permit Lottery and, nestled among 2,645 lucky recipients of an antlered-moose permit, was one Kyle Busch of Denver, North Carolina.
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If that name rings a bell, it should. Busch was a two-time Cup Series champion who won more races than anyone across NASCAR’s three national series. He was also, as of about a month ago, deceased. The man died unexpectedly at 41 after a bout of severe pneumonia spiraled into sepsis, and yet the great cold machinery of a state lottery system chugged right along and handed him the right to go shoot a moose this fall.
There is something darkly perfect about it. Busch built an entire career on showing up where he wasn’t expected and beating the locals at their own game. He won Maine’s signature race, the Oxford 250, fifteen years ago. He kept coming back to Oxford Plains Speedway long after he had nothing left to prove there, running super late models in the Celebration of America 300 last July for the second year running, and turning up for the inaugural Memorial Day Clash 200 the May before that.
“It’s always fun,” he told WMTW last summer about his Oxford runs, the kind of quote that hits different when you read it back now. He liked the cars, he liked the stout field, he liked a good hard-fought race. So of course Maine, in its infinite procedural wisdom, decided to keep the man on the guest list.
To be clear, nobody at IF&W did anything malicious here. Lottery databases don’t cross-check against death certificates, and an out-of-state entry from North Carolina isn’t going to set off any alarms in Augusta. The permit will presumably be quietly reassigned once someone with a pulse and a calendar connects the dots. But for one weekend at the Acton Fairgrounds, Kyle Busch was officially cleared to hunt antlered moose in the state of Maine, which is the most Kyle Busch outcome imaginable: winning something one last time, in a place he loved, after the checkered flag had already dropped.
Rowdy never did need permission to crash the party. Turns out he doesn’t need to be alive for it, either.
