One of the most iconic stories of NASCAR’s Chase era was the battle between Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kyle Busch in the 2008 spring race at the Richmond International Raceway. Junior had been in a position to win the race with three laps to go when Busch slammed into him and foiled the dreams of all 112,000 spectators. Years later, that particular moment has come up for discussion again.
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Junior discussed the incident on Dale Jr. Download recently after a fan asked him if he would do anything differently in the race. He said that once they fired off on the late restart, he had run the top lane seeing Busch’s tires spin. What he thinks he ought to have done instead is run on the bottom lane.
He reasoned, “I should have ran the bottom for about two or three corners to see if I could make the bottom work… I gave him the bottom and he drove right up to my back bumper.” Had he run in the bottom lane for a few laps and kept Busch in the dirty air, it would have forced him to move up. Junior, too, could then have moved up. This would’ve ended well for him, considering his superior speed.
Junior is still confident that Busch did not spin him intentionally. He said, “I know that that wasn’t intentional. There was a lot of animosity between me and Kyle back then. He feels like I had taken his ride, which really wasn’t exactly how that all played out.”
There were multiple factors that played into that moment at Richmond. The biggest of them all was Dale Jr. taking Busch’s seat.
Did Junior steal Busch’s ride at Hendrick Motorsports?
In 2007, Rick Hendrick had made the decision to bring Junior from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Hendrick Motorsports. But to accommodate him into the stable, Hendrick had to let go one of his existing drivers. The obvious choice would have been Casey Mears and that was who Junior himself had suggested as well. But instead, it was Busch who was let go.
Junior told Jeff Gluck in a 2018 interview, “I was coming in there and then Kyle was the one they decided to get rid of. They had every opportunity to get rid of Mears if they wanted to. That’s what I would have done. Kyle is definitely more talented, and it’s obvious now that would have been the smart move of the two guys. But that’s not what Rick decided to do.”
Busch, who was unaware of this at the time, just saw it as yet another reason to be angry at his “foe”. Fortunately now, they have resolved all their differences and are good friends.
