Kyle Busch discusses incident with Childress

Kyle Busch

Toyota Racing, #18-Kyle Busch, spoke to the media at Pocono, some notes and quotes:

Do you feel you have a respect issue in the garage and do you need respect in the garage to be successful?
"Can't answer the first part for you — you would have to ask everybody else. As far as needing respect in the garage area — certainly. It makes your day a little bit easier. Makes your job a little bit easier. I've been able to have good conversations and talk to people outside the race car or at driver intros or stuff like that. Whether it's the case that they're not being true to my face — I don't know, I can't read that. I'm not in people's minds. If you're mad at me, you'll have to tell me."

Do you understand why Richard Childress was mad last week?
"Me giving a congratulatory bump to Joey Coulter is what tipped him (Richard Childress) over the edge there. I don't recall anytime — face-to-face conversation where Richard did tell me that, 'If you touch another one of my cars I'm going to come find you.' I don't know if it was ever said in the media, but it was never relayed to me."

Have you received any secret fines in the last seven days?
"No."
How should NASCAR handle penalties if someone is threatening a lawsuit?
"I don't know. That's not to my discretion to be honest with you. It's further to NASCAR to depose. That's a great question for the media, but for myself, I need an instance of what you're explaining. Besides all the information you've just given me and the question you've asked, I can't really comment further."

Did you know how much damage there was on Joey Coulter's truck at Kansas?
"No, I didn't feel like I hit him all that hard. I just thought I rubbed him a little bit. Typically when you rub a guy, you don't see much damage from it. The trucks are so different too. I forgot about how the left-front fender on a truck — the nose is so much wider than the tire is so it kind of sticks out a little further so maybe there was more damage than I thought I would have caused. That's entirely my fault — I'm the one that instigated it there or initiated it. As far as him having to fly out body hangers and all that stuff — if it's something they didn't feel that they could hammer and dolly out, sorry it came to that."

Did the media interpret malicious intent toward Joey Coulter?
"There can be an easy way to interpret things sometimes and it seems like maybe I might be on the wrong end of interpretation a lot of those times. There was no malicious intent to be involved in hurting or damaging a RCR (Richard Childress Racing) vehicle."

Was anything said to you by Richard Childress prior to last week's incident?
"No. We were in that NASCAR hauler from Darlington after the race and he (Richard Childress) never said a word in there."

How are M&M's handling the recent situations?
"M&M's is handling things the best that they can handle it and going through things day by day. There's a lot of support there. We just had a NASCAR day at Hackettstown, New Jersey yesterday and people were awesome. They had a lot of great questions about racing, about the sponsorship, about the partnership that we have and how things have really been working well for them over the past few seasons and how we can continue to grow the brand. They're doing everything they can in their power to make sure that we continue to carry on the presence of M&M's in NASCAR and with Kyle Busch." Toyota Racing PR