More hot water for Kurt Busch

Kurt Busch’s tenure with Phoenix Racing may have ended Sunday, but the ripple effect of his last ride in the No. 51 Chevrolet is ongoing.

Already on probation for two incidents earlier this year, Busch faces possible sanctions from NASCAR for creating a safety issue at Talladega.

After leading six laps of Sunday’s race, Busch’s car lost fuel pressure on Lap 99 and spun off the front bumper of Jamie McMurray’s Chevrolet off Turn 2. Busch’s car hit the wall and sustained significant damage.

After climbing from the car and removing his helmet, thereby breaking radio contact with his team, Busch got back in the car and attempted to drive away, as emergency equipment fell from the rear of his car.

“I got out of the car and surveyed the damage, saw that it could still roll so I jumped back in,” Busch told a gaggle of reporters after NASCAR parked him. “I remembered, with these (fuel-injected) engines, they will run at 20 percent of fuel pressure to get it back to the garage. So I tried like heck. That is the competitor in me, which is the desire that I have and that is what gets misconstrued all the time. 

“This is the way my life works. Today is a perfect example. I’m leading, I wreck, I run out of gas, I’m still that competitive guy that tried to get back in the race, and now NASCAR is yelling at me because I don’t have my helmet on and I’m trying to get it to the garage so the guys can work on it. Now I’m in trouble. Now I have this little storm right here. This is my life. I’m not complaining — I put myself in a lot of these situations, but it’s on to good things now moving forward. I got all the bad luck out of the way. This year has been a great year to test me in every way.”

Perhaps Busch hasn’t dispatched all the bad luck. NASCAR called him to the hauler after the race and will consider additional action early in the week, with an announcement probable for Tuesday.

“We just talked to Kurt about his situation, him getting back into the race car and about being around the workers that were around back there,” Pemberton said. “He made an effort to get back in the car and get back into the garage, and we felt like it put some of our folks in harm’s way. We just talked to him about that.

“We parked the car for his actions, and we called him in the hauler about driving off with medical equipment on the car and our workers that were trying to tend to the situation. We’ll talk more, probably earlier in the week.”

Busch was fined and placed on probation for driving through Ryan Newman’s pit stall after wrecking at Darlington in May. After a confrontation with a reporter at Dover in June, Busch was suspended from competition for 10 days, forcing him to miss a race, and his probation was extended through the end of the year.

Busch is scheduled to make his debut with Furniture Row Racing next Saturday night at Charlotte. He recently agreed to drive for the Denver, Colo.-based team next year, replacing Regan Smith in the No. 78 Chevrolet.