November 8, 2011
By Doug Demmons
There was quite a bit of hand-wringing, hyperventilating and righteous indigantion with regard to Kyle Busch over the weekend.
ESPN actually ran an online poll asking if Joe Gibbs should fire him for having blatantly wrecked Ron Hornaday under caution during Friday night’s Truck Series race.
Others called for Busch to be parked the rest of the season.
Here’s what NASCAR should have done with Busch -- nothing.
Not because he was justified in what he did to Hornaday. He wasn’t.
If Busch felt he had been wronged enough to justify retaliation, there were probably two dozen better ways to exact payback than the way Busch did it.
But no matter how stupid or immature Busch acted, NASCAR had no business parking him for the Nationwide and Cup races at Texas Motor Speedway.
The reason is because not quite two years ago NASCAR Vice President for Competition Robin Pemberton stood before the assembled media at the NASCAR R&D Center in Concord, N.C., and proclaimed the era of “Boys Have at It.”
This was NASCAR responding to fans who had complained for years that NASCAR’s heavy hand of justice was stifling the personalities of its drivers.
So NASCAR said the marshal was leaving Dodge City and the cowhands were now in charge of the saloon. Henceforth NASCAR would do a “See No Evil” impression when drivers wrecked each other on the track.
And for a while, NASCAR stuck to its guns. When Carl Edwards went gunning for Brad Keselowski and launched him on Atlanta Motor Speedway’s high-speed track, NASCAR’s reaction was muted.
Likewise when Edwards blatantly wrecked Keselowski again at Gateway during a Nationwide race.
In neither instance was Edwards parked for subsequent races, even though both wrecks were at least as bad as what Busch did Friday night to Hornaday.
So what was the difference? Mostly it was timing.
Busch was unlucky enough to have done what he did a week after a wild and crazy weekend at Martinsville Speedway in which NASCAR apparently decided it had seen enough.
Here’s how Speed TV analyst and former crew chief Ray Evernham explained it:
“Todd Bodine, when the race was over, gets into the back of James Buescher and spins him and you see officials standing there,” Evernham said.
Bodine wasn’t penalized at all.
“When you put people in danger, you have to draw the line,” he said. “I think NASCAR may have looked at an incident like that all along, along with the other incidents at Martinsville, and said, ‘Hey, these guys are abusing the “Boys, have at it” rule.’”
NASCAR President Mike Helton acknowledged on Saturday when he announced that Busch had been parked that the whole “Boys Have At It” policy was rather amorphous.
NASCAR never did explain what actions would be considered going too far other than to do its best impression of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said in a 1964 case that he couldn’t define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it.
On Friday night, they decided that Busch’s full frontal assault on Hornaday was enough.
If Gibbs wants to fire Busch he is well within his rights to do so. Ditto if Mars wants to quit sponsoring Busch.
But NASCAR has no business suddenly becoming squeamish and doing a drive-by on Busch just because its chickens have come home to roost.
NASCAR started this when it declared “Boys Have At It.” It should have known that the day would come when somebody would go too far.
If you give a child a box of matches and tell him to go play, it’s your own fault when he burns the house down.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
Follow Doug on Twitter: @dougdemmons
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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