By: Andy DeLay, Staff Writer
I’ve sat down to write a lot of stories in my time and interviewed a lot of motorsports personalities, too. Stories about photo finishes, stories about championship battles, and stories about the young guns coming up through the ranks. However, today… Today is different. Today, I’m staring at a blank screen with a heavy heart, and the seat on the other side of the microphone is empty.
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard yesterday’s devastating news from Statesville, North Carolina. We lost Greg Biffle in a tragedy that feels too cruel to comprehend. We also lost his wife, Cristina, their little boy Ryder, his daughter Emma, and friends of the racing community who were on board with them, too.
When the news broke Thursday morning, the first thing that flashed through my mind wasn’t the number 16 Ford, or the championships he won in the Truck and Busch Series. It wasn’t the confetti or the trophies. It was the mountains.
We all knew Greg as “The Biff.” The guy who drove for Jack Roush for nearly two decades. He was a fierce competitor—sometimes a little prickly, always determined, and undeniably talented. He was a racer’s racer.
If you really want to measure the man Greg Biffle was, don’t look at the stat sheet. Look back at the Western North Carolina mountains in the fall of 2024.
When Hurricane Helene tore through the mountains, leaving communities isolated, flooded, and desperate, Greg didn’t wait for permission to go help out. He didn’t wait for a government contract. He fired up his personal helicopter, loaded it with his own money’s worth of supplies—Starlink units, generators, food, insulin—and he flew into the devastation.
He flew hundreds of missions. He didn’t do it for the cameras, though the world eventually did take notice. He did it because he had the skill, the machine, and the heart to save lives. That is the Greg Biffle I will choose to remember today. Not just the Hall of Fame nominee, but the humanitarian who became a lifeline when the world went dark for so many.
I’ve had the privilege of interviewing Greg several times over the years. We were acquaintances—I wasn’t in his inner circle—but he always treated me with a level of respect that made you feel like you were. He was straight with you. If he was happy, you knew it. If he was mad at the car, you knew that too. But in these last few years, watching him with Cristina and seeing the joy he took in fatherhood with Ryder and Emma, he seemed softer and complete.
The impact of this loss on the NASCAR community is already seismic. The messages are already pouring in—from team owners, from rivals who fought him for every inch of asphalt, and from the fans. To the fans, he was an icon of the Ford camp, a blue-collar hero. To the industry, he was a benchmark of talent.
Even bigger than all that, to those families in the Blue Ridge Mountains… He was an angel in a rotorcraft.
My heart breaks for the Biffle family, for the Duttons, and for the Wadsworths. There are no words that can fill the void left by a tragedy of this magnitude.
Hug your loved ones a little tighter. If you want to honor Greg, don’t just watch a highlight reel of his wins. Go out and help a neighbor. Do something kind when no one is watching. That’s what The Biff did when it mattered most.
Godspeed, Greg. You’ve cleared the mountain tops for the final time.
Image Credit: Chris Graythen/Getty Images