Ricky Stenhouse Jr. addresses NASCAR fine, team penalties following fight with Kyle Busch
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. has been fined $75,000 for fighting Kyle Busch at the NASCAR All-Star Race on Sunday and is speaking out on it. Per NASCAR reporter Danielle Trotta, Stenhouse has not decided if he’s going to appeal his fine for the fight. Additionally, Stenhouse’s team, JTG Racing, is still deciding whether it wants to appeal the team suspensions stemming from the fight.
NASCAR issued the fines and suspensions to Stenhouse on Wednesday. Team mechanic Clint Myrick was suspended for the next eight Cup Series races, and tuner Keith Matthews was suspended for the next four Cup Series events. Stenhouse’s father, Richard Stenhouse, has been suspended indefinitely.
“I think it’s fair to say that when you have crew members and family members that put their hands on our drivers, we’re going to react,” NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer said Wednesday morning on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, per NASCAR.com. “There’s not a lot of detail I’m going to get into due to the fact that these are appealable penalties, and I want to make sure that we’re fair to that process.
“With that being said, and we’ve been consistent about this, when crew members and family members get involved, we are going to react. That’s exactly what we did.”
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. blames Kyle Busch for missing the All-Star race
Stenhouse punched Busch after the All-Star race. In the second lap of the race, Busch bumped Stenhouse which led to him wrecking his career and sidelined for the entire event. Stenhouse parked his car in Busch’s pit box and waited to confront him once the race was over.
“When you wait 198 laps and you make those decisions that were made, again, we’re going to react to that,” Sawyer said. ” … Once we get to the point where it gets physical, we want the two drivers to be able to have time to express their differences. Once it escalates to a physical altercation, we are going to react.
“Granted there was no tunnel, granted there was no crossover bridge (to allow Stenhouse Jr. to leave the track), better decisions could have been made throughout that period of time between the incident on the race track and the incident in the garage post-race.”
While appearing on the Stacking Pennies podcast, Stenhouse showed some remorse for punching Busch. “The sucky part is you always feel bad after the fact,” Stenhouse said. “When you wake up the next day, you’re like ‘You know what, I probably shouldn’t have done that,’ because you got kids watching. …But [Busch] also shouldn’t have wrecked me on purpose just because I passed him.”