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Monday, 03/27/06

Drivers have a bumpy day at Bristol

Busch nudges Kenseth in final laps to take win

By LARRY WOODY
Staff Writer

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Throughout a long afternoon of beating and banging around Bristol Motor Speedway's concrete cauldron, emotions continued to bubble and percolate — and finally at the end they boiled over.

With five laps to go and 160,000 roaring fans on their feet, Kurt Busch punted Matt Kenseth out of the lead and went on to win the Food City 500 by 0.179 of a second over Kevin Harvick.

But the action wasn't over. Kenseth, trying to scramble back and salvage a decent finish, wrecked Jeff Gordon on the last lap. When Kenseth came over to apologize following the race he was greeted by a hard shove in the chest by a furious Gordon.

"That's just Bristol, bumping and grinding," said Busch, a five-time winner on the rugged little half-mile oval. "It takes a certain tenacity to win here. This place breeds controversy.

"I had to muscle my way past Kenseth there at the end. Sorry Matt. I've been bumped before and I didn't cry about it. Matt's a friend of mine and we'll be friends next week. Our job is to win races and I'm going to race the same way in the last laps when the race is one the line. At the end of the day you have to be able to hold up the trophy without any grudges."

Said Harvick: "I hate to see Kurt Busch win. What a whiner."

Busch's response: "That's Kevin Harvick. If he'd won and I'd finished second I'd have congratulated him and that would have been the end of it. This is ridiculous. He talks a lot and that makes (the win) even better. You guys (media) keep talking about it but I'd like to end this (bickering), ice it down."

Kenseth, who finished third after spinning Gordon, said he was shocked by Gordon's post-race push.

"I guess I shouldn't have gone over there," he said. "I should have known better. I didn't mean to get into Jeff, but I don't blame him for being mad."

Gordon said of his uncharacteristic temper tantrum: "I like racing with Matt but I certainly didn't like racing with him today. I didn't like what he did and I showed him my displeasure. I get fired up too. I felt what he did was uncalled for."

Kenseth described Busch's winning bump as "a cheap shot. I wouldn't take a cheap shot like that … but maybe I should start."

Earlier in the race Gordon hit Martin Truex Jr. and when he tried to retaliate he got in the way of Tony Stewart, who promptly put Truex in the wall.

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060327/SPORTS09/603270344/1041