Angry rivals pile on driver
Aggressive Busch blamed for wreck
LOUDON, N.H. - As soon as he checked his rearview mirror and saw the swirl of pinballing cars getting farther and farther away, Kyle Busch knew that on a day in which there was one wreck after another, the blame for the biggest of them all would fall at his brake pedal.
Essentially, he was the guy in traffic who doesn’t realize that someone has slammed on the brakes two cars up, causes a crash, then escapes any real damage.
Bunched in tight coming out of a caution with the Lenox Industrial Tools 301 just past its midway point yesterday, Busch was riding behind Martin Truex Jr., who was tailing Dale Earnhardt Jr. Earnhardt spun the tires on the 88 car, creating an accordion effect for the cars behind him.
It forced Truex to either slow up or bang into Earnhardt’s bumper. He slowed up. Faced with the predicament behind Truex, Busch tried to squeeze between cars into space that wasn’t there, but ended up rear-ending Truex, turning him sideways.
“It was just mayhem from there,’’ Busch said.
Ultimately, seven cars would tangle in the wreckage, making it the biggest mess of metal in the 16 years that New Hampshire Motor Speedway’s been running Sprint Cup races. It was the eighth of 11 cautions on the day (that counted for 47 laps altogether) and it played a huge role in Joey Logano picking up the first win of his young career.
Figuring his approval ratings would be low in the garage, Busch got the apology out of the way early.
“I hate it for all those guys,’’ said Busch, who finished seventh and held on to a relatively comfortable spot in the top 12 with nine races left before the Chase for the Sprint Cup. “I know they’ve got Chase contentions, too. We were just battling for every spot out there today.’’
The hate overflowed anyhow.
“Kyle just lost his head like he usually does when something bad happens,’’ said Truex, 24th in the points after finishing 37th. “He decided he wasn’t going to lift [off the gas pedal]. He was going to turn me on the straightaway for no good reason at all.’’
After watching the replays from the Care Center with his No. 83
“It looked like the 18 was completely impatient,’’ he said.
Leading up to race day, drivers talked about how the intensity of double-file restarts would affect racing at a track like Loudon where there’s barely enough room to pass. NASCAR recently made the switch to stack the lead cars side by side coming out of a caution (before leaders were on the outside and lap-down cars were on the inside), intensifying competition on restarts. Drivers have mixed feelings about the change.
“Restarts are hectic,’’ Busch said. “Everybody’s fighting for every inch that’s out there because it’s so hard to pass with these cars.’’
Jeff Burton, who had his No. 31 Chevy riding as high as eighth before getting caught up in the wreck, said, “Double-file restarts are going to make things more aggressive. They are going to create more accidents. I don’t think fans want to see wrecks, but they want to see more aggressive racing, so that’s the product of that.’’
For some drivers, Busch’s aggressiveness was the problem, not the restart.
“This is a product of one guy making a mistake,’’ Truex said. “Simple as that. This isn’t Pocono or Michigan. The front straightaway isn’t 30 car lengths wide. People get checked up. You just have to chill out and wait until you can race them. I don’t race on a restart basically with 150 laps to go or whatever it was. There was no reason for it. Our car is tore up and I’m [upset] about it.’’
Whether it was an honest mistake or a stupid one was up for debate, but Vickers wasn’t at all forgiving.
“That’s the second week in a row that [Busch’s] stupidity cost us a race, and it’s frustrating,’’ he said. “I guess everybody just learns to expect Kyle doing something stupid. I had a friend tell me the other week, ‘Stupid’s forever.’ ’’
Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com. 