Busch apologises for obscene gesture

Busch ran strongly in the early going until he got spun by another car on lap 160, suffering damage to his car's bodywork and requiring repairs in the pits.

His crew worked on the car in the pits under the caution, releasing Busch right before being lapped by the field, but while driving out of his pitbox and beating the pace car to the scoring line he was caught speeding, causing him to be held in the pits for one lap as a punishment.

As he served his penalty he made a hand gesture to the official standing in front of his car to show his disagreement with the decision, an action that was caught live on TV by the onboard camera in his car.

"I'm sorry I lost my cool to everybody on this team, to everybody at NASCAR and all of my guys that support me," said Busch. "It's just so frustrating the way that you have such a fast race car and then you get spun out and you don't expect to lose your cool, I guess.

"I lost my cool in what I was doing and I had no worries about a camera inside the car at that point."

The Joe Gibbs racer lamented losing the chance to score a good result that would've moved him up in the standings as some of his closest contenders hit trouble later during the event. NASCAR officials handed him an additional penalty for his gesture, holding him in the pits for two more laps to put him three laps down on the race leader.

He eventually got one of the laps back, but only managed 32nd place in the end.

"I got spun out and just everything else went downhill from there," said Busch. "Through the whole day we had a really fast race car and the guys gave me a great race car that was fast, that was capable of winning, but it's just unfortunate that I tried pulling back and getting down to the bottom lane and I got spun out in doing that.

"Where I had another guy earlier in the race do that to me and I let him in. You get spun out and wrecked like that and you're not supposed to lose your cool...? I mean, hello!

"I came down pitroad and we got the right side [tyres] changed and then tried to get back out there. I wasn't trying to speed, but apparently I must've been a couple lights over or something like that on my tach where it was just a small speeding penalty, but it wasn't intentional.

"Obviously, I got the penalty for that and then the ensuing ones later. I apologise to all of my guys for letting them down and for getting so behind today that we could never make it up."

Busch could yet face further penalties for the gesture he made to the official in pitlane.