Kyle Busch takes the blame – sort of – for multicar crash at New Hampshire
Joe Gibbs Racing driver Kyle Busch finished seventh in the Lenox Industrial Tools 301 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. // LaDon George, NASCAR Scene
LOUDON, N.H. – Joe Gibbs Racing’s Kyle Busch, who finished seventh in Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Lenox Industrial Tools 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, took a conciliatory tone about his role in the big accident involving eight drivers.
Busch got into the back of Earnhardt Ganassi Racing’s Martin Truex Jr. on a lap 175-restart, sending Truex spinning in front of large pack when Truex checked up behind the Hendrick Motorsports car of Dale Earnhardt Jr. that had spun its tires.
Emotions ran high after the wreck, with both Truex and Red Bull Racing’s Brian Vickers saying Busch could probably have avoided the contact. Busch said he regretted the accident, while stopping short of taking full responsibility.
“The 88 [car of Earnhardt Jr.] spun his tires on the restart, I went to choose a lane, went to the middle and the 42 [car of Juan Pablo Montoya] and I got together a little bit," Busch said. "That pinched me with the 1 [car of Truex] and I spun the 1 [car] out and, it was just mayhem from there. I hate it for all those guys.”
Busch blamed the accident partly on the chaotic nature of NASCAR’s new double-file restart procedure for Sprint Cup, which made for closer racing at New Hampshire than the track has customarily produced.
“Restarts are hectic, man,” Busch said. “Everybody is fighting for every inch that’s out there because it’s so hard to pass with these cars – if you get it done right now then you can kind of single-file out for a while and then you don’t have to worry about much.
“The sooner you can get everything done – the quicker, the better, the more you’re by yourself.”
Crew chief Steve Addington defended his driver, who ran well at a track where the team struggled last season.
“That was just a racing deal,” he said. “Double-file restarts right here, somebody checks up and doesn’t go, somebody’s got to go somewhere. We could have got hit from behind and turned around, too, so that’s just a product of what we’ve got here. …
“They can point the fingers all they want too but he did what he needed to do to keep from running into the 1 car square and just picking the rear tires up off the 1 car when all that happened, and kept us from getting turned around. So that’s just part of that restart there and when the 88 [car] didn’t go.”
