Mike Hembree: Crew chief Addington says Busch is a hard racer
By Mike Hembree - Associate Editor
Friday, May 09, 2008
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COMMENTARY
DARLINGTON, S.C. – Steve Addington looks like one of the last people you’d find in the middle of a firestorm.
He is calm, collected, stable – seemingly a man with few vices, beyond the occasional cigarette from which he can’t escape. He has been roaming stock car pit roads for a couple of decades and has seen just about everything, but he wasn’t necessarily ready for his current posting.
Addington, 43, is crew chief for driver Kyle Busch, and that means he rides on the edge of a hurricane and is sometimes buffeted by it. If Busch is fire, Addington is ice. The mix, so far, works.
Addington came to this sideshow with no real background in what it means to work so closely with a driver of Busch’s flammability. His foundation in big-scale NASCAR racing was in the former Busch Series with driver Jason Keller, a guy who stirs controversy about as often as Barry Manilow.
Now Addington is riding shotgun with a guy who, well, might need a shotgun. The pairing, though, has produced a pair of wins this season and has Busch atop the point standings. Addington, he said, would be nowhere else.
“Kyle wants to win as much as we do,” he said. “It’s just been a good fit. It’s been exciting for me. It makes me feel good to go to the race track knowing I have a chance to run good no matter where we go. It’s really been a lot better than anything I really expected coming into the deal.”
Huh? Isn’t working with Busch like trying to mate reluctant wolverines?
In a word, no, said Addington.
“I hear everybody talking about how he’s kind of hard to get along with or about how he’s always griping and complaining,” he said. “It’s not like that. I’m a laid-back person. What I’ve learned over the years, I think, has helped him calm down and realize that we’re trying as hard as we can to give him what he wants in a race car. He gets excited when his car is not exactly right, but he’s passionate about his racing. He just wants to win.”
Many fans aren’t buying this, of course. They see Busch as a loose cannon, a driver who races on the edge and doesn’t care how many people are pushed over it because of him. One of the best examples, in their view, came at Richmond, where intense racing sent Busch into Dale Earnhardt Jr. and into the heart of darkness.
“He was trying to win for his race team,” Addington said. “If he had backed off, I think he would have lost a lot of respect. It was hard racing, and they got in the corner and got together. I think he got a little loose, and Dale Jr. wasn’t giving him any room, and Dale came down a little bit and they touched, and that was the result of it.
“You know the kid didn’t mean to take anybody out. He certainly wouldn’t have taken Dale Jr. out just because of the repercussions of it. He’s a fun kid to be around. He fits in good with this race team. I wish everybody could see that side of him.”
That’s going to be a long, hard sell, of course, but Addington seems satisfied to be in the best position of his career and to be in the hunt when the race begins. And he said he understands the emotion that surrounds incidents like the Junior-Busch fracas at Richmond.
“I had a long talk with Tony [Eury] Jr. [Earnhardt Jr.’s crew chief] over at Charlotte Tuesday night,” Addington said. “Junior fans are one way. They’re dead-set into it. All they look at is what happened and the result. They don’t really look at it as being from a racing standpoint. They get upset.
“The thing that I feel bad about from the whole deal is how they responded toward Kyle. He’s a hard racer, and both of them were racing. It was just a racing accident. I just wish they’d understand he didn’t do anything on purpose.”
- Mentioned Drivers:
- Kyle Busch
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