Busch all smiles after Stewart pushes to win

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Despite a wild, 180-plus mph slide through Daytona International Speedway's Turn 1 with less than seven laps remaining in Saturday night's Budweiser Shootout, Kyle Busch's hair was straight again when he exited his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet on pit road.

So was his relationship, he said, with third-time Shootout winner Tony Stewart, who sent leader Busch on the wild ride that directly resulted in Stewart's win.

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"I'm not mad about it -- I'll just go on and take my shots and go on to next week," Busch said. "It was definitely a handful. It was hair-raising; though it wasn't terribly hard [to save it] -- but it isn't something I want to do all the time.

"I'll go and shoot the [expletive] with him. I was in his motorhome for, like, two hours last night anyway -- so we're all right. I don't think he meant to do it on purpose. I think it just kind of happened."

Busch led the most laps, 39, in the 70-lap special event for 2006 Bud Pole winners and former Shootout winners -- but a two-tire gambit on a caution with 18 laps remaining might have been half the culprit that resulted in a seventh place finish.

"It was working pretty good," Busch said of his car down the stretch. "It wasn't the best of what it could have been -- I think those two tires probably hurt us a little bit. But we were trying something there; we took a chance and gambled on it.

"It's the Shootout, and we wanted to see what it would do. We didn't know if tires were going to mean that much, but [Stewart] had a little bit more maneuverability than me and especially when he got tucked up behind me, it took away all grip."

Stewart created the other half of Busch's dilemma with a loosen-him-up-and-rattle-his-cage move heading into Turn 1 on lap 64 that sent Busch sailing from the lead, to the top of the 31-degree banking and back to 10th place at the end of the lap.

Busch and Stewart not surprisingly had diametrically opposite views of the scrum, with Busch saying, "it was clear as day on the replay, which I just saw -- clearly contact."

"It's racing and it's a part of it," Busch said of Stewart's move, smiling all the while. "But the only bad part about it is he's the guy that complained [last year] we were going to kill somebody out here."

Stewart's comments came after a particularly wild Shootout, which was won by his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin and which resulted in rules against flagrant bump drafting. (Continued)