Yesterday's NCWTS race was quite the entertaining event. Kyle Busch got run up into the wall by Ron Hornaday and then proceeded to absolutely lose his mind and wreck both their trucks at high speed under caution.
See the link below for the story and video on NASCAR.com.
Now, despite Hornaday's excuses afterwards, it looked to me like the initial incident was entirely his fault. He got a good run on Kyle but didn't have enough room to get through. Kyle squeezed him down to defend the position, but he tried anyway. He nearly made it, but didn't. Then, after making contact with the lap truck and moving up into Kyle, with only a thin veil of control left he STILL didn't let up and ended up moving Kyle right into the wall. That was a dick move, and I can't help but think that his relationship with Harvick and disdain for Kyle may have factored into the utter disrespect it showed.
Of course, he should have thought twice about who he was dealing with.
There's really no excuse for Kyle then going completely batshit crazy, but it sure was fun to watch.
So then… Kyle's been parked for the rest of the weekend and you can be sure that Hornaday will be looking for revenge at some point. There's going to be plenty of drama for the rest of the season and probably into next year.
I mean… Kyle is effectively eliminated from the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Would he do whatever needs doing to ensure Harvick doesn't win it? If he did, he'd be ensuring that neither of them will ever win a championship for as long as they're both still in the sport. Hopefully that occurs to him before he does anything even crazier. This feud should really be kept out of the Sprint Cup.
It's like the US and Russia fighting the cold war in Afghanistan. They want to puff up their chests and throw some punches, but nobody wants to muck up the home turf.
As a final thought… there's been some talk about double-standards here. Why is Kyle being penalized so strongly while Burton wasn't penalized at all after wrecking Gordon under caution a while back? What happened to "Have at it, boys!"?
As of now, there's no details about the reasoning behind the penalty, but in my own opinion, as much as I like Kyle, I think NASCAR is justified in parking him and that they really need to send a message here. I like that they're letting the drivers self-regulate their behaviour this year, but this move was just plain dangerous. If Kyle had waited for them to slow down and then just ploughed into Hornaday's truck, I doubt the penalty would have been as severe, if there were any at all. As safe as NASCAR is these days though, you just can't have people purposely wrecking each other at over 100 mph. Especially after the recent autoracing deaths. The cars are safe, but nothing is perfect and you can only imagine what the racing landscape would be if Hornaday had been hurt or killed. I'd expect Kyle would be behind bars right now.
If Kyle is going to retaliate on the track like that, I sure hope he's spending some free time working out in the gym. He's gonna have to learn to throw a few punches if he wants to earn some respect with this sort of attitude. Nobody is going to respect a guy who will run into someone with a racecar but turn turtle when confronted in the garage.