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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
JENSEN: Cooler Heads Prevail — For Now
There was a rivalry shaping up at Bristol this weekend...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted March 22, 2010   Bristol, TN
SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)
Well, now, Bristol came in like a lion and went out like a lamb. Who saw that coming?

Friday at the Super Bowl of short tracks, there was a world of hatin’ going on: Brad Keselowski, vowing not to back down, Kevin Harvick calling Carl Edwards two-faced and Edwards responding by saying Harvick was evil and a bad person. Just for good measure, for the umpeenth time, Tony Stewart told the media they were all stupid morons.

In other words, all was right in the short-track universe.

And then Sunday dawned and a race broke out. A mostly polite one.

Keselowski and Edwards raced side-by-side for a stretch. Cleanly.

There were a few incidents, to be sure, including a 13-car fender bender triggered when Greg Biffle and Mark Martin came together on the backstretch. Of course, Biffle and Martin are clean drivers in most situations — Biffle being near Joey Logano being the exception — and instead of shaking fists afterwards, the two gentlemen apologized to each other and their respective crews for the inconvenience.

And how’s this for weird? Kurt Busch’s crew inadvertently doomed their driver with a better pit stop at the end of the race than eventual winner Jimmie Johnson had. Busch and Johnson were running 1-2 in the Food City 500 when they made their final stops under caution with about 15 laps to go. Four drivers took two tires and took over the top four spots, while Busch came out fifth and Johnson sixth.

That meant Busch restarted on the bottom lane of the third row, with Johnson outside of him. The outside lane is almost always the fast way around Bristol, so Johnson was able to sail off to victory, while a frustrated Busch was hung up behind Carl Edwards, eventually finishing third behind Johnson and Tony Stewart.

Busch, who’s been known to display a volcanic temper at times, sounded like his head was going to explode after the race, as he tried to keep calm, when what he really wanted to do was rip someone’s throat out. Anyone’s, probably. And who could blame him? He did nothing wrong and he still lost.

“To pour my heart and soul into this race to beat the 48 car (Johnson), I was trying to hit my marks every lap,” said a disconsolate Busch. “I feel exhausted, I feel disappointed.”

Busch went on to say that he’d rather have been beaten by any of the 41 other drivers he was racing against besides Johnson, to which Johnson had the perfect retort: “I've watched from afar. Before I was in the sport people would say, ‘Anybody but the 3 (Dale Earnhardt),’ ‘Anybody but the 24 (Jeff Gordon).’ I'm awfully proud to be in that category where they're saying, ‘Anybody but the 48.’ I think it's awesome.”

It seems like a lifetime ago, but Busch and Johnson waged an epic duel for the championship in 2004, the first year of the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Busch won it all that year by the narrowest of margins, just 8 points. He survived losing a wheel in the season-finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway to earn just enough points to beat Johnson. In fact, Johnson finished second in the race to Greg Biffle, just 0.342 seconds away from a championship. The rest, as they say, is history.

So I’m thinking, this year just might be a return title match, a bare-knuckled brawl between the reigning champion and the extremely motivated former champ, who’d like nothing better to reclaim his crown.

Whether you are a Kurt Busch fan or not, this much is undeniable: Busch is a racer’s racer, someone who hates losing with a passion. And he especially hates losing to Johnson. Busch doesn’t hop out of the car after finishing eighth and proclaim what a good points day he had. He’s there to win, and I daresay the racing would be better if more guys were as fired up about winning as he is.

What we saw on Sunday at Bristol maybe wasn’t what fans were expecting or hoping for after Friday’s histrionics. No one put anyone else into the wall during the race, or went on an obscenity-laced tirade afterwards. By Bristol standards, the Food City 500 may have been fairly tame.

But it might have marked the start of a real, honest-to-God-take-no-prisoners rivalry between champions Busch and Johnson. And as the season goes on, what those two do on the track and say off of it might just prove a whole lot more entertaining than the childish antics of some supposed rivals in the garage.

Let the games begin.

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEEDtv.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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