NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition Scott Miller said that it was not obvious that Ross Chastain was blocking Kyle Busch’s path.
Chastain listened to his Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Kurt Busch when the latter asked for the bottom lane. On doing so, Chastain’s car moved in front of Kyle Busch’s car, thereby slowing down his momentum. This action led to Kurt winning the race and Kyle finishing second.
Kyle was furious with Chastain after the race and said that Chastain did it intentionally to help his teammate.
“He turned right in order to get dead right in front of me,” Kyle added. “For a whole two laps, I just killed the tires trying to get turned underneath him. You can’t just change direction, and when I tried to change direction, he watched his mirror and changed direction with me. So he just stomped on the brake and air blocked. It’s pathetic.”
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However, NASCAR is seeing the event in a different light. Speaking in the “The Morning Drive” on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, Miller said:
“I know we’ve got the thing bubbling up with Ross and all that, and everybody has heard the comments afterward,” Miller said. “You know, it wasn’t an obvious blocking job in my view.
“Ross, he was racing his own race. That’s an unfortunate situation for somebody like Ross to be in, really, with trying to stay on the lead lap and all those things, managing his race and then have those two come up on him at that point in the race. Difficult situation.
“I don’t think there’s a lot else to say about that one. I know people are questioning that. We certainly didn’t see anything other than hard racing from the tower perspective.”
Kyle certainly won’t be happy with NASCAR’s perspective on the event that he thought was obvious for him.