Kurt Busch banked a million dollar check thanks to a late-race confrontation between his brother, Kyle Busch, and Denny Hamlin at Charlotte in NASCAR’s All-Star Race.
Kyle Busch was making a run on Hamlin in the last of four segments of the non-points race when, he thought, Hamlin shut the door sending Busch into the outside wall. "My game plan was to make big, bold moves," Kurt Busch said. "I had Jimmie Johnson in the middle of the racetrack. I was digging underneath him. I saw some paint and sparks fly off Turn 2 when Kyle brushed the fence with Hamlin. I don't know what happened there, but it hurt both their momentum.” Kyle was so angry that he radioed his team that he had murder in his heart, then stormed into Hamlin’s race hauler awaiting his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate after the race ended. Hamlin was warned to stay away. The All-Star Race is a non-points race, consisting of four segments. Kurt Busch, driving for Roger Penske, started on the pole due to a rain out and didn’t appear to be headed to victory lane in the final segment especially after banging the wall twice earlier in the event. During a mandatory ten-minute caution Steve Addington, (Kurt Busch’s current, and Kyle’s previous crew chief) made the necessary adjustments to put Kurt in position to win. Addington explained, “we changed a good bit. It was shock adjustments, some bump stop adjustments. We got off when we got on the two tire sequence. Our car wasn't very good on two tires. We tried to adjust for what we thought the car was going to do and it got really tight. When we came in, I put the window net down, started talking to him. He was frustrated losing handle on the racecar. I said, we’ll make big adjustments. I went back to stuff we did in practice. We made some changes towards that direction with the car like we did in practice and it came alive.” After the race Hamlin said that Kyle had calmed down, and then explained how he saw the incident. “First he (Kyle Busch) got a big run off the corner and I was clear getting into the corner. Basically I just throttled up extremely early and really it was a bad corner. He was going to go by me. He kind of went to the bottom and then went up high it looked like. "Of course, I’m looking out my front windshield and he says I’m clear so I’m going to use all the race track I can. The problem is that Kyle had a run to the outside and with me moving up and getting real tight, it then took some air away from the front of his car and he slid up into the wall.” Martin Truex Jr., who qualified for the All-Star race by a win in the “Showdown,” finished second. Joey Logano finished third.
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