It was also Busch's on track antics that got him in trouble with fellow drivers and, of course, the fans, starting with that fateful Richmond night when Rowdy wrecked NASCAR's most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt, Jr.
"Kyle has his style of driving, but I would have been a little more…I don't know." Earnhardt, Jr. said after the race.
“I wreck somebody (intentionally), I ain't going to leave him in good enough shape to come back and get me in the same race, so that wasn't my intentional,” he added.
Later in the year, it seemed like his bad boy antics had come back to bite him, with another incident involving Dale Jr., a sparring of words with everyone's cousin, and an near brawl with the defending truck series champion.
"Let's make it real clear, I'm not apologizing," a frustrated Carl Edwards said in his post race press conference, after winning the Sharpie 500.
Edwards put the bump and run on Busch en route to winning the race, leading the two to tangle after the checkered flag fell. Busch ran into the side of the No. 99 Office Depot Ford, and Edwards retaliated by spinning the JGR Toyota out.
Cousin Carl stated that he did what he thought Busch would do to him in the situation, in which Busch responded:
"Hmmm. Well, being as though I'm not in that position, then I would say that I wouldn't have touched him.
"But you don't try to hit somebody, and you know, even so, driving in the back of him getting into the corner. But I had been getting into the corner light all day, and I don't know, maybe I over braked and rove myself right back into his nose; who knows.”
After several run ins together, Edwards was asked if he thought he and Shrub were even.
"I don't know. I feel like we're pretty even on my side. You know, that's how I feel about it. I don't know; I'm sure it will be exciting. It's NASCAR and we all want to win really bad, that's for sure."
Busch also got into an incident during a truck race with Ron Hornaday, with which Hornaday said "I'm going to have to teach him a lesson and I hope I don't hurt him."
“I was going down the frontstretch, trying to look high and he stayed up against the wall so I stayed down to look underneath him and then he turned down,” Busch said. “I wasn’t expecting him to come across my nose like that. I got into him, spun him out.
“He didn’t have any damage to his truck fortunately. We had our incident to our Charlotte where I had a lot of damage done and wrecked a perfectly good truck. [Today] wasn’t payback or anything like that. I just got into him. I’m sorry about that.”
Yeah, okay Kyle. I bet Hornaday, Edwards and many others feel karma got to Busch once he reached the final ten races, where he finished outside the top twenty four times and only had two finishes in the top five.
You know what they say about karma, Kyle...
3. California Seeping; Drivers Complainin'
The second race of the NASCARseason seemed more like a marathon after it took nearly five hours to run the first 87 laps due to rain, and the race was pushed back to that Monday. Sure, Carl Edwards might'vestarted his impressive winning streak there, but the bigger story of the weekend was a seeping problem that led to several drivers crying foul.
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