Justin Allgaier Distances Himself From Kyle Busch’s Guitar-Smashing Nashville Legacy, Details ‘Devastating’ Impact

Justin Allgaier would rather play a guitar than smash it. He still recalls when Kyle Busch won a NASCAR Xfinity race at Nashville Superspeedway in 2009, and then channeling any number of guitarists in rock bands of the ‘80s, celebrated by smashing the custom made Gibson Les Paul guitar in victory lane.

Busch thought the incident was cute. Allgaier did not.

“So I lived that whole Kyle Busch smashing it,” Allgaier said on this week’s episode of the Stacking Pennies podcast with Corey LaJoie.

“I was lucky enough to be fairly close with Sam Bass (the late artist who created the one-of-a-kind guitar that had been valued at around $25,000), and the devastation that he went through during that was wild.

“I mean all the heart and soul (Bass) put into all the paintings back in the day, and he’s like, ‘Man, I would have thought it was really cool. I would have come up with like a dummy guitar if I knew (Busch) was going to smash it.’

“He’s like, ‘Little did I know he was going to smash that one.’ He spent 100 hours painting it. There is no way I’m ever smashing a Nashville guitar.”

Indeed, Allgaier has two guitars in his house that mark his Xfinity Series wins at Nashville. He would have had a third guitar but finished runner-up in the 2021 race there (finishing second by one second to Busch). There was no guitar smashing by Busch in that race.

“It actually works out really good,” Allgaier said of the two guitars he won at Nashville. “My oldest daughter, Harper, her favorite color is green and (other daughter) Willow, her favorite color is pink and purple. So now I have a green one and a purple one. I’m like this is perfect. So I know which one’s going to which room, just like I planned it.”

And both guitars are completely intact, no smashing for Allgaier.