Bumper cars in Bristol

By Mike Mulhern.
Media General News Service
Published: August 26, 2008

BRISTOL, Tenn.- Halfway through Saturday night’s Sharpie 500, with Kyle Busch easily cruising toward what would have been his 18th major NASCAR national touring victory of the season, and no one able to mount much of a challenge, this was the feeling:

There may never be another water bottle tossing incident here, like that Rusty Wallace-Dale Earnhardt outburst of anger. Never another “rattle his cage” move, like Earnhardt vs. Terry Labonte. Not with comfortably three-wide racing on Jeff Byrd’s spiffy new, but not-so-Bristol-like concrete. No, the new Bristol Motor Speedway certainly doesn’t offer that infamous hot-head racing of the old one-groove layout, no more temper tantrums.

Wrong.

Thanks to Carl Edwards.

“I just had to ask myself ‘Would he do that to me?’ And he has before ... so that’s the way it goes,” Edwards said of his bump-and-run to victory.

“That’s just the way it is, it’s just racing. I have a lot of respect for the guy, and he was real fast. But we can’t give up points when they’re right there for us to take.”

Busch and Edwards led 499 of the 500 laps, but Busch clearly had the dominant car once he got to the front.

Edwards, from his first weeks on the tour a few years back, has raced with an attitude—and that old Dale Earnhardt approach to potentially controversial incidents: “Oops. ‘scuse me. Sorry.”

And Edwards, who has become Jack Roush’s top driver this season, and the only man seemingly who can challenge Busch, played the hand like that again down the stretch Saturday night - using the bump-and-run to push Busch out of the way and score his third Sprint Cup win in the last four weeks. Pocono, Michigan, and now Bristol.

Edwards opened the season with wins at California, Las Vegas and Texas. After bobbles at Atlanta, Bristol and Talladega, he caught fire again. Consider his seconds at Darlington, Dover, Daytona and Indianapolis, and you can see why Roush is not conceding anything to Busch and Toyota in this year’s championship chase, which opens at Loudon, N.H., in three weeks, after playoff-critical stops at Fontana, California, and Richmond.

Just as this new type of racing at this high-banked track may have started growing on the fans, some 168,000 strong, some typical Bristol melees occurred to shake things up and give Edwards the opening he needed to rattle Busch’s cage.

“The way this works - a real smart racer explained it to me this way, after he’d wrecked me and I was real mad,” Edwards said. “He said ‘I just had to look at your rear bumper and decide would you do this to me? And you had before, so it was a real simple decision’.

“Earlier in the year we had a Nationwide race, and Kyle was a lot faster than me, and he went ahead and got to my back bumper and just smoked the back bumper of my car and sent me up the race track. Afterwards he said ‘Sorry, man, my car was just faster’.

“So I had to ask myself, when I went down there in the corner, ‘Should I lift and brake early, and do the best I can ... or should I just give him a little tap and see what happens?’.

“So that’s the way it went, and that’s the decision I made.

“I’d do it again.”

And Edwards will certainly get more chances this season.

Even-Steven now? “I feel we’re pretty even, on my side,” Edwards said.

Busch doesn’t feel that way. He rubbed doors with Edwards on the cool-down lap, and Edwards responded by bopping him in the rear and spinning him out.

“He was mad, and I can completely empathize with his anger,” Edwards said. “I probably would have done the exact same thing.”

Roush himself was a bit nonplused by it all.

“I’m in the company of some really, really fast people…. and I can tell you that having fast race cars is one thing, but being in the company of fast racers is another whole thing,” Roush said.

“Carl had an opportunity, and Bob Osborne (his crew chief) had an opportunity to work on the car. I think NASCAR has achieved what they were looking for, in terms of having very equal cars. This is our fourth time here (with the new winged car). The shocks are pretty well understood; everybody’s got bump-stops that do about the right job here, and the cars are even.

“And until it came time for Carl to reach out and take a chance on using his car up, it was going to be a follow-the-leader deal - because there’s an advantage to being in front. When you’re behind, you just don’t quite have the option you do when you’re in front.

“So it came down to Carl having a little bit better car on the short run…. and it came down to Carl wanting it bad enough to go get it. It was there in front of him, and he took it.”

Now, when will Busch decide to take it back?

Mike Mulhern can be reached at .