In final laps at Charlotte, Busch's maturity showed

CONCORD, N.C. -- The advisory came over the radio, in a voice that was kindly but stern. "No wrecks, OK?" team owner Rick Hendrick asked his driver Kyle Busch. "Be smart."

It was a brief request that heightened the tension in the final stage of Saturday night's Bank of America 500, when Hendrick Motorsports' top contender for the Nextel Cup championship found himself in front of the organization's lame-duck driver with just five laps remaining. If Busch harbored any thoughts of revenge against his soon-to-be former employer -- which released him from his contract to make room for Dale Earnhardt Jr. -- there was no better way to take it than by booting Jeff Gordon at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

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The crowd of 185,000 held its collective breath, anticipating contact. Gordon drifted high. Busch dove low, pulling nearly alongside of the four-time Cup champion, in a move that smacked of belligerence. But in reality, it was anything but. Busch was doing just as his car owner had instructed, and preventing a wreck.

"He played it really smart," Gordon said later of his young teammate, who will compete for Joe Gibbs Racing next year. "He could have run right into the back of me and spun me out so easily."

Instead Busch pulled an evasive maneuver belying his age and reputation, avoiding a No. 24 car heading briefly backward because of a momentary loss of power. Gordon's fuel cell wasn't empty, but it was low enough that the pickup had difficulty getting gas to the engine. On the restart after a 12-minute delay for oil on the racetrack, with Gordon in the lead, the vehicle with the trademark flames on the hood picked the worst possible moment to conk out.

Busch had to have felt certain degrees of embarrassment and exasperation when he was let go to make room for Earnhardt -- after all, he's in the Chase for the Nextel Cup, while driver No. 8 is racing for 13th. But Saturday night, there was no attempt at vengeance. There was only a cool-headed move under pressure, one that helped Gordon win the race and continue what seems more and more like a march toward an inevitable fifth championship.

"I've got two feet and two hands and eyeballs, so I can look out the windshield and make sure I don't run into the back of somebody, you know?" Busch said. "Obviously, Jeff, we got down there into Turn 1 and he stumbled and ran out of fuel, had a vapor issue or whatever it was. We'll go back and research that more and try to figure out what it was. But I didn't run over him. I got passed by three guys and I was anxious to get going and didn't want to dump him. If it was anybody in that situation, you don't want to wreck him. I feel like I could have done a pretty good job of not running into the back of him."

Gordon braced for the impact -- not because he thought Busch would act maliciously, but because he felt it couldn't be avoided.

"I saw in my mirror the 5 [car of Busch] was right on me," he said. "I was waiting on him to hit me. Not that I was expecting him to hit me, but he thought I was going to be going. When I wasn't going, I thought for sure I was going to stack it up and they were going to get into me. I tried to move up and little, and that's when he got low by me."

It was a steady move by a kid who often gets a bad rap, who has shown over the course of this Chase that he's gaining some of the maturity he might have lacked earlier in his tenure at Hendrick. Plagued by accidents over the last two weeks that have scuttled his title chances, he could have sulked or wrecked his teammates or turned all his focus to the No. 18 car he'll drive next year. In some ways, it would have almost been understandable. Rejection stings. Yet this painful process may have done what all those years of driving the No. 5 car couldn't -- force Busch to grow up.

"I'm really proud of Kyle," Hendrick said. "You've seen it. He could easily have had an attitude or lost focus. But I think if anything, he and [crew chief] Alan [Gustafson] and the whole team have stepped it up. I don't know if I've ever seen a situation in my 25 years where a guy knew he was going somewhere else, and stayed focused and determined to do the best he could. It's been real impressive what he's done."

Of course, a little prompting from the team owner doesn't hurt. Yet that's standard operating procedure for Hendrick, who well remembers having to separate the crews of drivers Ken Schrader and Geoffrey Bodine after the two teammates tangled on the Martinsville short track many years ago. He issued the same warning before the spring race at Bristol, where Busch restarted in front of Gordon, and the next week at Martinsville, where Gordon and Johnson dueled at the end.

"We'd have done that no matter who it was," Hendrick said. "Any race where it comes down to our two cars and there's a caution, I believe you just come on the radio and tell them to think about it, look at the big picture -- not just the Chase, but what made the organization what it is today, working together. Think about it. Jeff and I talked on the radio, if Kyle got there, he wasn't going to try to block him. If he was better than Jeff, he wasn't going to try to wreck him. I asked Kyle to just think."

He did, and came to Victory Lane to congratulate Gordon afterward. These weren't team orders, like when Casey Mears was asked to let Busch by at Dover so his teammate could accumulate more points in the Chase. This was a request to work together. And Busch, to his credit, understood.

Even if he didn't particularly like it.

"I've had that before, so it's all good," he said. "I don't know. I mean, I'm used to it. I get told a lot of things to do, so I'm used to it."

The opinions expressed are those solely of the writer