NASCAR announced earlier Wednesday that they have put championship rivals Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards on probation for six weeks after their little postrace tussle at Bristol Motor Speedway.
I gotta tell you folks, I am so happy that was it — a small slap on the wrist.
We need an intense rivalry in this sport, and sometimes things like this will happen when competitors like Edwards and Busch duke it out for victory. NASCAR can sit there all they want and say "We are not going to tolerate this,"
but guess what? Our sport needs that sort of passion.
NASCAR needs a Dallas/Washington rivalry. We need a Boston/New York type of feud. Hopefully this six-week probation won't hamper the brewing rivalry between the two championship leaders.
Having said that, you have to keep a rivalry in the right perspective. You can't just wreck each other and possibly take out other drivers too.
I've told the story a hundred times about the period when the Busch Series (now Nationwide Series) was in its absolute prime around 2001-02. Greg Biffle and Kevin Harvick were at each other's throats — figuratively of course — every single week. If NASCAR comes out and says we don't need that, then they are totally wrong.
Even though I didn't think any type of penalty was necessary, good for NASCAR for not going any deeper than probation. I can see where NASCAR had to do something because of the postrace retaliation by both Edwards and Busch. But in the end, it was just like in grade school, they just pulled out the ruler and gave them a small warning and nothing more. To continue the school analogy, NASCAR didn't send anybody to the principal's office or suspend them.
To me, Carl and Kyle didn't do anything wrong. They were racing hard with less than 50 laps to go at a short track. Edwards saw an opportunity to rattle Busch's cage and get him out of shape by barely getting into him. As a result, Carl won the race. Kyle didn't like it, expressed his displeasure and Edwards replied in kind. In my book, no harm, no foul.
The only thing I hate in this instance, which many of you who read my columns regularly know, is that race cars were used to retaliate. That's one of my pet peeves because those teams loaded up those cars — not that they were severely damaged, but still — and those drivers won't see those cars until they get used in another race. Somebody in both the Joe Gibbs Racing and Roush Fenway Racing shops had to fix those cars. But to me, that's where the owner steps in, not necessarily the sanctioning body.
If I were an owner, and this may sound a little bit out there, I would tell my drivers from the minute they signed their contract that if they race hard and damage their car during a race to get a better result, I have no problem with it. But if you damage your car after the checkered flag or under caution because you are ticked off, we will evaluate the damage and it's coming out of your portion of the purse. If they want to get out of their race cars and yell and push a little bit — at the racetrack, the airport, or in an alley somewhere — I'll be there cheering them on. But don't use the race cars — drivers aren't the ones that fix them.
Still, six weeks probation is nothing. I've been in this sport a long time, and I never want to say never, but so far I have yet to see where being on probation in NASCAR means a single solitary thing. I guess there could always be a first, but I hope not in this instance.
I think Edwards and Busch will be as intense as ever even after this penalty; they'll just be a bit smarter and not do anything under race conditions.
About that race winning move
I've gotten a lot of e-mails asking for my thoughts on the late-race bump Edwards used to win.
To help put it in perspective, let me give you all a personal example. If my son Brandon, who runs in the UARA Series, won a race the way Carl did Saturday night at Bristol, I'm going to be very happy because I didn't see anything wrong with that move. Now if he did it to somebody earlier in the race and spun them out, I would be pretty upset. But Edwards did it for the win and he barely knocked Busch out of the way, so there's no problem with it.
I've got to be honest. If I'm at the racetrack and Brandon gets beat that way, I'll probably get pretty upset at somebody — it's human nature.
Kyle has to stop and realize that has he been on the other end of this deal. Did he forget Richmond when a similar thing happened between him and Dale Earnhardt Jr.? I know Busch got a little loose at Richmond, but Dale Jr. crashed and was unable to get a really good result.
This past Sunday was the 96th Cup race at Bristol Motor Speedway, and I would say that a third of them were won using the ol' bump-and-run at the end of the day. How many did Dale Earnhardt Sr. win that way? How many times did Jeff Gordon do it to Rusty Wallace? Matt Kenseth did it to Gordon a few years ago. Kevin Harvick did it to Tony Stewart and those guys are great friends! The list goes on and on, but that's called racing hard in the closing laps at Bristol.
If my team lost that way, I'd be fuming. But if we won, I'd be tickled to death. That's called being a racer.
Everybody is different though. Go back a year ago when Jeff Burton didn't lay that bumper to Kyle Busch — he didn't want to win that way. You know what? That is fine too. Burton is a fierce competitor, but that's not for him and that's OK.
I don't have a problem with Kyle being upset after Saturday night. Maybe I thought he was a little out of line with his postrace comments, but what do you expect when microphones are put in his face shortly after that emotional display? I bet if you interviewed him again today he'd be more diplomatic, but he was upset because second place absolutely sucks to him.
That is what's great about our sport. Our athletes share their emotions right after the events. Just imagine what you would hear from a pitcher if he gave up a game-winning grand slam in the bottom of the ninth?
We'd get true emotion. And I'm glad we get to share that with our fans.
