Logano-Kenseth clash shows Chase’s volatility
Joe Gibbs stood, arms crossed, staring at the No. 20 Toyota his crewmen were pushing onto a lift gate. Gibbs had expected the bright yellow race car would end the afternoon a
and a berth into the next round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, so he thought. It was completely plausible the way Kenseth had ruled the afternoon. But after leading 153 of 269 laps in the Hollywood Casino 400 on Sunday, one of Gibbs’ former employees, the driver Kenseth had replaced in the No. 20, coincidentally, was celebrating in victory lane instead.
Team Penske’s Joey Logano, responding to two block attempts, had turned Kenseth off the lead with five laps left in the scheduled distance and held on to win in a green/white/checkered finish. It was a win that in theory would have meant more to Kenseth. But it could ultimately prove to be a key move in Logano’s grab for a first championship at NASCAR’s highest level.
A win for Kenseth would have sustained his title hopes in the brutal elimination-style NASCAR playoffs, sent him with Logano, who earned a spot last week with a victory at Charlotte, into the third round. Instead, after finishing 14th, Kenseth is mired 35 points out of the eighth and final transfer spot and in an unenviable must-win situation Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway. Gibbs was displeased. “Everybody saw what happened,” he said. “That’s all I’m going to comment on.”
Logano’s team owner, Roger Penske, said it was “one of those racing accidents.”
Kenseth said he was “absolutely, 100%” wrecked intentionally.
Logano said he was racing for the trophy within immediate reach, not the one possibly awaiting after the final race of the season at Homestead-Miami Speedway. It was a case of two drivers in an inherently selfish sport acting selfishly over the second lane each wanted.
“You want to win the race,” Logano said. “That’s part of the strategy when you go to this round — or really any round — is to win as often as possible to keep your competitors out. Everyone is fast in the Chase right now, right? Everyone has got a lot of speed in their cars. Everyone is running up front at points during the race. Really, for us it’s just about winning trophies. We don’t have to think too much deeper than that. It’s just we want to go win the race.”
So as usual, there is no fact in these sorts of racing circumstance, just vantage points.
From Logano’s perspective, whether he truly meant to wreck Kenseth — and he’s not admitting it if he did — he did what needed to be done for himself and his team. He did what he should have done as dictated by the provocative new postseason format NASCAR unveiled last season.
Rules of engagement and shades of decorum are different. And even if it truly didn’t figure in the high-speed calculus entering Turn 1, Logano might have eliminated one of the biggest threats to his bid for a championship. And that’s his job and his prerogative under the current code.
For Kenseth, though, a line had been crossed.
“He just plain wrecked me,” he said on pit road. “He cries on his radio a lot, I guess, about blocking or moving around. But man, you’re leading the race, you can pick whatever lane you want. It’s not like he was alongside of me. To wreck somebody for wanting to be in a lane you wanted to be in seems kind of risky and not very smart, but that’s the decision he made.”
The new Chase created numerous conflicts last season, from a Kevin Harvick-instigated tussle between Jeff Gordon and Logano teammate Brad Keselowski to Kenseth tackling Keselowski in the garage over an unrelated inci- dent at another race. This was the first flurry in what will certainly be an escalating chain of events this season. And the system, Penske said, is working. But it had nothing to do, he said, with the incident Sunday.
“I think the Chase format was designed to create tension, to create competition and certainly pressure on the teams and the drivers,” Penske said. “From the standpoint of the way they drive on the racetrack, you just have to watch the restarts and see that it’s elbows out the window there every time. I think this situation here at the end, as I said earlier, it’s unfortunate.
“You don’t like to see that, but if you go back and you look at it frame by frame, I don’t think you can just say Joey ran into him on purpose. I think there was movement on the (Kenseth) car coming down on him, and certainly when he got in the wall, we didn’t run into the wall in Turn 1 just because we wanted to, so, to me, it’s unfortunate for Matt and Joe Gibbs, but I think the format is terrific.”
Logano’s maturation process hasn’t been as much about developing as a driver but as a competitor. Numerous conflicts with master manipulator and defending series champion Harvick might have steeled the 25-yearold for this and certain conflicts ahead. Replaced by Kenseth at JGR in 2013 but resurrecting his once-promising career at Team Penske, he advanced to the Homestead finale last season and appears to finally be poised to fulfill the promise divined for him since he was a teen.
Kenseth was in the way Sunday, though. And he couldn’t be blamed for disliking the route Logano took through him.
“I’ve probably been one of his biggest supporters,” Kenseth said. “It was an awkward thing, obviously, taking his ride. I was excited for him when he started winning at Penske and when he got that ride. I found him today ( before the race) and congratulated him on racing each other for a championship. I was very disappointed that he would do that, especially that he’s already in. I didn’t run into him. Yeah, I was running the lane he wanted to run in, but isn’t this racing?”
It is, but the rules — especially the unwritten ones — are hazier. And no one can be blamed for exploiting them.