Chris Buescher to Dale Earnhardt Jr.: ‘This is going to hurt for a really, really long time’

Following a finish for the ages at Kansas over the weekend, Chris Buescher is still letting the reality of his second-place finish sink in.

It’s been tough, to say the least.

“This one’s going to hurt for a really, really long time,” Buescher said on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Dirty Mo Media.

The finish was especially brutal because of how it unfolded. Buescher had the lead in the final lap before Kyle Larson came up from the outside and bumped Buescher hard twice toward the inside of the track.

The second bump was just enough for Larson to edge ever so slightly past Buescher at the finish line, claiming a victory by 0.001. But it wasn’t initially announced that way at the track, where Buescher was initially flagged as the winner.

That changed after about a minute, when video replays confirmed Larson had won by a nose.

“I told everybody I thought I was going to throw up on the way to the airport,” Chris Buescher said. “I guess when I look back at it if we’d gone across the line and from the get-go thought we finished second you would have been upset about it, you’d have been hurt about it, but it would have been OK.

“But to be in that hour or time or really it was that first minute that everything was very confusing, we’re trying to figure out how in the world we’re getting this answer off of it, transponders and timing and scoring everything are in our favor. Obviously the painted line, which doesn’t really matter, but it’s comical right now to talk about it.”

Brief controversy over whether the painted line had been crooked at the start-finish point ensued, although ultimately that didn’t matter at all.

Buescher’s crew chief met with NASCAR and accepted the results eventually, taking some of the potential sting out of the situation for NASCAR.

“But to see it all play out the way it did it just, it hurts,” Chris Buescher said. “Knowing the result, man, and understanding it, like y’all said, it’s not going to make it any easier. You understand it now at least, but it’s not going to make it any easier.”

With the result in the books, Buescher is now simply trying to move on. He’s gotten some encouragement from his crew on that one after the tough beat.

“Some of our guys said, ‘Just don’t let it hurt any more than six days,'” Chris Buescher said. “Let’s just go to Darlington, win there and we can put it behind us. So we’ll try to figure out how to make that one work.

“But this one hurts. We finished second at Phoenix to Christopher Bell and it wasn’t even close. I mean he just walked away from the field. At that race, second felt good because we knew we needed a lot of work to win. This one to be that close and not be able to get it, it’s gonna stick with us for a long time.”