CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Even now, 29 days later, it is an almost unimaginable tragedy.

On Dec. 18, 2025, seven lives were lost in a plane crash in Statesville, 40 miles north of Charlotte. We still don’t know why.

We do know who, though, and hundreds of people came together Friday morning at Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte to remember the seven people who were killed in Statesville at a memorial service. Everyone was there to celebrate the lives of former NASCAR racer Greg Biffle, his wife Cristina, his children Emma and Ryder, his best friend Craig Wadsworth and Jack and Dennis Dutton, who were father and son.

The 85-minute service came in front of a crowd of about 600 people. It was open to the public, and so it drew a wide range of mourners. There were men and women in black suits. There were whole families wearing boots, jeans and hoodies. Many of the mourners kept their coats on — it’s hockey season at Bojangles Coliseum, home of the Charlotte Checkers, and the temperature inside wasn’t a whole lot different than the frigid January air they walked through outside.

But people forgot the temperature as they listened to NASCAR luminaries like Jeff Burton and Phil Parsons eulogize the seven deceased. Other speakers included Greg Biffle’s niece Jordyn Biffle and his close friend Garrett Mitchell (also known as the YouTube star Cleetus McFarland).

“He lived life fast and fully, and he loved to make people smile,” Jordyn Biffle said at the service. She was talking about her uncle Greg at that point, but the comment could have been made about any of the seven who died, really. They all were fans of things that went fast — planes, four-wheelers and automobiles.

And the smiling part?

They were all good at that, too. Photos and videos shown on the scoreboard at the service depicted one family after another — both biological ones and racing ones — grinning widely at the camera, and at each other.

It was Greg Biffle who was the most well-known of the seven, of course, due to his NASCAR championships and, later, his rescue efforts after Hurricane Helene in western N.C. It turned out Biffle was quite a prankster, too, as a number of stories revealed from the podium illustrated Friday.

I had known a little of this already, having asked racer Dale Earnhardt Jr. about Biffle earlier in the week. Dale Jr., it turns out, had once gotten a boxer puppy from Biffle (Dale named the dog Killer). Later, they would tie their boats up together on Lake Norman and shoot the breeze. After they stopped competing against each other on different race teams, they found out they actually had a lot in common.

“He was a super dude,” Earnhardt told me, “once you got to know him. And man, did he ever like to mess with people.”

That Biffle did, from a very early age. “The Biff” pranked people and didn’t mind getting pranked himself.

The speakers at the service Friday told stories about a high-school-aged Biffle doing burnouts in front of his school and getting suspended; of climbing on a closed waterslide and sliding down in the middle of the night as an adult and getting caught; of racing with a broken arm that he and his team tried to hide from his car owner; of losing a bet and having to go sleeveless on a ski trip. And, of course, there was all the humanitarian work Biffle did — under all those hijinks, there was an enormous heart.

As NASCAR president Steve O’Donnell told me earlier this week: “If you asked me who a NASCAR driver is that everyone would want to aspire to be, it’s Greg Biffle. And I don’t mean that just from on track, but just a good guy who was involved in so many things, cared about family and made friends immediately. ... That’s why it’s such a huge loss. That’s why you’re seeing this outpouring. Greg reflects the kind of a guy a lot of people want to be. If we could have more Greg Biffles in the world and in our garage area, it’d be a great thing for the sport.”

While this memorial service represented closure in some ways, in other ways this wound remains fresh. In one of those acts that makes you lose some faith in the human race, Biffle’s house was reported as burglarized on Jan. 8, just three weeks after the plane crash. The incident report said $30,000 in cash and a backpack were stolen, along with some guns and memorabilia.

But more than anything else, the mystery of the crash looms.

We still don’t know what caused it. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the crash, has yet to release who was piloting the plane at the time of the crash (three people on board had pilot licenses).

Any day now, though, the NTSB will release its preliminary findings. That report will give everyone a sense as to why that Cessna plane left Statesville on a Thursday morning, then immediately turned around and tried to return to the same airport before striking trees and light stanchions, crashing and bursting into flame — only 10 minutes after takeoff.

“It’s just such a tragedy,” NASCAR Hall of Famer Mark Martin told me earlier this week. Martin was a teammate of Biffle’s on the racetrack and a pilot who has flown Cessnas himself. “And it’s more than Greg. It’s an entire family, and a father and son, and Greg’s friend — such a huge loss. And as a pilot, it’s additionally tough. ... Pilots have a pretty good idea of what sort of issues there can be. ... And then of course, my dad and his wife and his daughter died in a plane crash. So it’s a real sore spot for me.”

Yes, Mark Martin lost three family members to a separate plane crash back in 1998. That is unfortunately one of a series of plane crashes that have taken the lives of people who were central to NASCAR or were family members of someone who was.

That is another story for another time, though.

Friday was about trying to heal and to remember the seven people who died on Dec. 18, 2025. They didn’t deserve what happened. But they were remembered well and fully, on a cold January day in Charlotte.

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