Gordon, Busch show passion at Texas

What you saw happen Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway between Jeff Gordon and Jeff Burton was the combination of frustration and passion.

Gordon felt he had been pushed around and didn’t understand what the heck had happened. You clearly saw Burton put him in the wall, so you saw a disagreement between two competitors over what had happened.

You saw Jeff Burton trying to explain what happened while at the same time Jeff Gordon walked up and let his displeasure be known. As you saw, he was ready to let Burton have it. I am glad to see the fire in Gordon and it was especially nice to see Burton man up and say it was totally his fault.

Now we’ve seen this kind of passion out of Gordon before.

I for one am glad to see it. I love seeing that Jeff still has the passion. I mean if you don’t have the passion anymore for what you are doing, then you need to move on and do something else. Sunday he showed he still has the fire. He didn’t care to hear Burton’s explanation. You clearly saw that Jeff Gordon was letting Jeff Burton know that he was really pissed off.

Now on the Kyle Busch saga ... well, where to start? He has been in the sport long enough to know that if you speed down pit road trying to beat the pace car, well then you are going to lose the lap. NASCAR does all it can to promote safety on pit road for the crew members and pit road is not the place to be racing.

He should have simply come back down pit road and taken his one-lap penalty like a man. He’s got all the God-given talent in the world and I think he could have gotten his lap back. That’s not the way Kyle viewed it, unfortunately. He came down to take his penalty and then disrespected the NASCAR officials.

Now sure, I have flown off the handle in my career, but I have never given a NASCAR official an obscene gesture like Kyle did to show my disrespect of them.

I agree with what NASCAR did. There’s a code of ethics when it comes to respecting NASCAR officials and it’s a high standard. So when you make the mistake like Kyle did with his obscene gesture to the NASCAR official, you will pay the price.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the passion and frustration that Kyle was feeling. He came off looking like a spoiled brat. On top of that he made a bad day worse. This has plagued him time to time in his career.

He will overstep on occasion -- and everyone pays the price. Kyle’s actions hurt everyone on that Joe Gibbs Racing team. They had busted their butts on that car and he just ups and sets them back because of yet another meltdown. He took that car completely out of the equation with no chance of getting that many laps back with the time that was remaining.

You just can’t do it.

He simply didn’t have to shoot the whole team in the foot like that.

In today’s NASCAR, with the wave-around rule and the Lucky Dog rule, getting one lap back is very possible. Instead he went off the deep end.

Look, if someone doesn’t know the rules, then learn the rules. Quit playing video games and go learn the rules of our sport.