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.

	BUDWEISER SHOOTOUT
Race Recap Unofficial Results

"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.

"He wasn't on me hard," Busch said. "It was just a little bit, and just enough that I kept getting loose and kept getting loose. By the time you get so far, you're pretty much gone -- and I was able to keep it, thankfully for that."

Stewart repeatedly praised Busch for what the two-time Cup champion called "the best save I've seen in a long, long time." But Stewart also repeatedly confessed only to loosening Busch, he claimed without contact.

"I hope it's not going to be like that," Stewart said when asked if that was going to be the only way to pass people throughout Speedweeks. "I don't believe we touched him [because] if we had touched him and sent him up the racetrack, he would have crashed for sure.

"I think that save he made in Turn 2 will be among the top five of the year."

Busch's older brother, 2004 Nextel Cup champion Kurt Busch, said he was in the midst of a drafting shuffle when the incident occurred, but that he didn't have to have an eyewitness view to know what happened.

"I was ninth or 10th at that point, but I knew exactly what happened," Kurt said. "It was a matter of Tony waiting for the best opportunity.

"Tony's going to do what he needed to do to win, and I think Kyle would have done the same thing. Nothing really got started there except a guy wanting to win the Shootout."

And despite finishing where he did in his second career Shootout, Kyle Busch grinned throughout his post-race interview session, despite the only real payoff in the event being the win.

A quiet moment and a firm congratulatory handshake from car owner Rick Hendrick helped put Kyle Busch's mind at ease.

"I would be [more frustrated] if it was the [Daytona] 500 and that has a lot to do with it," Busch said. "I had a great time out there. It was a lot of fun [and] these guys gave me an awesome car so there's not much that I can complain about.

"The best one won tonight, definitely. [Stewart] was an awesome pusher, but I just wasn't able to hang onto it, there, when he got me real loose, when he was bump-drafting me through the corner.

"It was a tough break for us because we weren't able to come out of it with a win tonight but we learned some stuff about it. Maybe those two tires weren't quite what we needed, but we'll go into the [Gatorade Duel] 150s and learn from it and go to the [Daytona] 500 after that."

After the incident Kyle Busch ultimately slid as low as 17th among the 19 cars of the 21-car starting field that were still running, but finished seventh when a multi-car accident created a last-lap melee between Turn 4 and the finish line.

"I came off of [Turn] 4 and I saw somebody a little bit sideways and I knew they were going to hit the fence," Busch said. "I headed low and I knew there were going to be cars going low and coming back across so I just kind of aimed for the middle an hoped for the best."