Brad Keselowski: 'I got wrecked by a dirty driver'

Jeff Gluck | USA TODAY Sports

KANSAS CITY, Kan. – Winning the Chase for the Sprint Cup might have just gotten a whole lot more difficult for Kyle Busch.

Busch wrecked Brad Keselowski while the two raced for second place with 13 laps to go in Saturday's Nationwide Series race at Kansas Speedway, and a furious Keselowski vowed to make sure the incident carried over to the Sprint Cup Series – possibly as soon as Sunday's Hollywood Casino 400.

Busch is third in the Chase standings and is battling for his first title; Keselowski, the defending series champion, missed the Chase and hinted he has nothing to lose.

"I got wrecked by a dirty driver," Keselowski said. "There is no other way of putting it."

"Brad Keselowski knows what dirty drivers are because he's done it plenty of times," Busch shot back. "I have yet to wreck a person on purpose."

Asked if the incident would carry over into Cup Series, Keselowski said, "(Freak) yeah it will."

"That goes to show you the kind of person Brad Keselowski is and the class he doesn't have," Busch responded.

Despite the incident – which Busch said was unintentional ("I got tight behind him," he said) – the Joe Gibbs Racing driver made a case that Keselowski should not retaliate in the Cup race.

The reason, he said, is because Keselowski wrecked Busch last year during the Watkins Glen Cup race – an incident which eventually cost Busch a Chase spot – but Busch did not retaliate during the 10-race playoff.

"I had an opportunity to wreck him a few times throughout the Chase and didn't," Busch said. "(I) let him and Jimmie (Johnson) battle it out on their own and ultimately he won the deal. If I wanted to, I could have cost Brad Keselowski a championship, but I'm a bigger person than that."

As the two drivers raced hard in the closing laps on Saturday – they were competing for the owner points title as well as the win – Busch appeared to try and side-draft Keselowski on the front straightaway by driving to the inside of his left rear quarterpanel. But Busch said the car "got inside of his wake and got too close to him and it pulled me right into him."

"Once we touched, he was gone," Busch said.

Keselowski, though, was certain the incident could have been avoided. He initially jogged across the infield grass with his finger pointed at Busch's pit crew, but officials intervened before Keselowski could get close. Keselowski then ran at least a quarter-mile to the infield care center with reporters and officials in tow – a comical scene from an outsider's view.

"Hey @keselowski will you please come run in my (charity) 5K next Sunday morning at 10 a.m.?" Kasey Kahne tweeted. "Its a really good time!"

But the Penske Racing driver wasn't in a joking mood over what Busch had done.

"We were good," Keselowski said. "We've had a solid year of racing each other and now we've got war. He started it and he can have fun with the results."

Busch said Keselowski blocked him and ran into him on a couple different occasions during the Nationwide race and said he "didn't appreciate that very much."

But that wasn't motivation for an intentional wreck, Busch insisted.

"I'm not out there to take vengeance in a Nationwide Series championship," he said. "I've got bigger fish to fry on Sundays than on Saturdays."

On the whole, Saturday wasn't a very good day for Busch in any way – similar to many days at Kansas Speedway during his career. Busch started the morning by crashing on the first lap of Cup practice and will have to start at the rear of Sunday's field in a backup car.

"I need a lot of help," he said. "Our car is not very good. I'm not very good here. … It just went down in the corner and flat spun out before I even got there."

As for the potential problems with tires many teams seem to be dealing with at Kansas? Busch said it "wasn't the tires' fault" and blamed last year's repave of Kansas Speedway instead.

"We keep telling all these racetracks not to repave and they don't listen to us," he said. "It's frustrating because we know what kind of race this place put on before they repaved it. I mean, it was a great racetrack. We went from the bottom all the way to the wall and you could run it anywhere you wanted to.

"And they repaved it and caused single-lane racing, and it sucks."

Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck







