Roush: Busch used up chances

HOMESTEAD, Fla. – Kurt Busch’s championship banner waved high over Homestead-Miami Speedway, the only evidence at the track of the embattled driver.

Suspended for the final two races of the season after a run-in last week with Phoenix police, Busch won’t be around to lower the flag for his successor following Sunday’s season-ending Nextel Cup race.

Jack Roush, his former car owner, said he never considered lifting the ban and allowing Busch to drive this weekend.

“Kurt had been a challenge for everybody that interacted with him on the team at some time or other,” Roush said. “He used up his equity with his sponsors. He used up his equity with me.”

The fallout from Busch’s reckless driving arrest was still reverberating around the garage a week later, with everyone weighing in on the situation. He had supporters in teammate Greg Biffle and rival Tony Stewart, and a heavy critic in Roush, the owner who made Busch a NASCAR champion.

Roush is still angry over Busch’s decision to leave his organization to drive for Roger Penske, a decision Busch made just months after winning his first Nextel Cup title. His desire to move on shocked Roush and forever fractured their relationship, with Roush saying he hasn’t spoken to the driver in at least four weeks.

So it was no surprise when Roush took the unusual step of kicking Busch out of the car and refusing to let him finish the final two races of the season. It was Roush’s way of getting the final word.

Although police now say Busch was far less than the legal drinking limit, they accused the driver or being belligerent, argumentative and verbally harassing the officer performing the stop.

Roush said reports of Busch behaving badly didn’t surprise him.

“I was doubting that Kurt was in fact intoxicated beyond a legal limit because it had been his nature to be very much like he was reported to be in contentious situations that frustrated him before,” Roush said. “He’s an extraordinary talent, but he’s really had trouble dealing with the realities of normal social behavior.”

So now, on what should have been Busch’s final hurrah, he’s become the champion everyone wants to forget.

Gibbs team in capable hands

At Joe Gibbs Racing, nobody calls J.D. Gibbs “Coach.”

But the president of the family business is the man running a team on the brink of its third NASCAR championship while his famous father takes care of other business.

Shortly after Joe Gibbs leads his Washington Redskins against the Oakland Raiders on Sunday in Landover, Md., Tony Stewart will race his No. 20 Home Depot Chevrolet at Homestead-Miami Speedway in an effort to wrap up another title for the team that carries the coach’s name.

Stewart, who added a title in 2002 to the one Bobby Labonte earned for the Gibbs team in 2000, heads into the season-ending Ford 400 needing only to finish ninth or better to take his second championship, no matter what his pursuers do.

J.D. Gibbs doesn’t want to take the credit, but if Stewart can wrap up the title, this one would belong mostly to him.

The first two titles came while he was learning his role as team president and his father was still attending races and coming to the office almost daily to oversee things.

Then the elder Gibbs, a three-time Super Bowl winner and Hall of Fame inductee who ostensibly retired from coaching at the end of the 1992 season – the race team’s first year – decided to return to the sidelines with the Redskins in 2004.

Trucks season finale postponed

NASCAR’s season-ending truck race, the Ford 200 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, was postponed Friday night because of rain. The race is set to start at 8:30 a.m. (EST) today.