The end of the May 2008 Cup race at Richmond Raceway resulted in an angry crowd, hurt feelings and a handful of death threats for Kyle Busch.
It’s the race where Busch sent Dale Earnhardt Jr. spinning and fans into a frenzy that still hasn’t quite died down.
Ahead of this weekend’s Richmond race, Busch stopped by the Dale Jr. Download for a further discussion of the spin that shook Junior Nation.
During the podcast the two discussed the fallout of the incident, with included Busch receiving “crazy death threats” in its wake.
“There was death threats to the house,” said Busch, who also recalled a death threat cutting short his victory celebration after an Xfinity race later in the year. “As soon as I did the victory lane stuff they corralled me and got me and took me into a cop car and took me out of the race track in a cop car.
“I’m like ‘What are we doing boys? What’s going on?’ ” Busch said. “They were like, ‘We’ve had a tipoff that there’s a shooter on the loose. A guy’s coming to the race track with a shotgun.’”
Busch said such threats happened “periodically” through 2008 and once or twice the following year.
“We actually had a behind-the-scenes FBI guy tailing me through the rest of ’08, we didn’t think we needed him anymore after ’08 was over,” Busch said. “He came with us about everywhere.”
On the track, Earnhardt and Busch’s feud, which began building in 2007, continued in the fall when the series returned to Richmond and Earnhardt enacted his revenge, spinning Busch while he led on Lap 212.
“I felt like I had to do something,” Earnhardt said, citing pressure from fans to drive like his father. “Here is the perfect opportunity, right there in front of me. We’re at the same race track, we’re running you down early in the race. It was just the perfect opportunity. ... I had been contemplating it. Dreaming about it. ... If you can understand this man, even contemplating about it, thinking about it, (I was) dreading it. ‘Cause I didn’t want to do it, but I had to do it.”
Head to JeffGluck.com for an oral history of the 2008 race at Richmond.
Thursday’s NASCAR America, which airs from 6-6:30 pm ET, will feature the Dale Jr. Download with Kyle Busch for the entire show.