Gordon went on to win the race and punched his ticket to the Championship Race at Homestead Miami Speedway.
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“That’s what happened there”, Logano said.
“Well, yeah. We were racing for the win (at Kansas). Here, it’s just a complete coward move”, Logano told NBC Sports. “Complete coward. It’s a chicken-you-know-what move to take out the leader when your race was over”.
Alright, I can honestly say this week’s piece is going to have a lot of emotion, because quite frankly, there was a lot of it on Sunday. Kenseth would end up on the outside of the Chase after last weekend, while Logano was riding momentum never seen in the Chase Grid format. “I knew if we got here, we’d have a shot not only at just having a chance of winning, but even getting the points that we needed to advance and go do it over the next couple weeks”. At the beginning of the season I didn’t feel like …
“The vehicle wouldn’t turn and just kept going straight until I couldn’t do anything, and I started wrecking everybody”. That reaction from my team, and to have my family come up… this is unbelievable. “I’d much rather be out there racing for a win than to be in that spot”.
NEW SAFER BARRIERS: Martinsville Speedway was like most tracks this year in that it added energy-absorbing barriers in a safety effort that started after Kyle Busch was injured in a crash at Daytona.
Still a good finish for Hayley. “That’s more than anyone can say, at least in the last three races”. We’re on a heckuva run. “We just stuck with it all day long, and I was just trying to protect those rear tires and then that incident with the No. 22 (Joey Logano) and those other guys”.
Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer will step down after the season, ending a 29-year run during which he turned the Hokies into one of the most consistently successful teams in the country. On the whole, this has been a down year for Hendrick Motorsports, the team Gordon has driven for his entire career.
“The splitter was dragging the ground and got into the corner and certainly ruined his day”, Kenseth said.
There’s no question the knockout-style Chase format has created the drama and excitement it hoped to, and there are going to be moments like Sunday, when Matt Kenseth intentionally took out race leader Joey Logano to the crowd’s joy at Martinsville Speedway.
The NASCAR website noted that this was apparently Kenseth’s payback for Logano after the latter knocked him out of the way in a Kansas race two weeks ago. (The Chase was originally instituted in 2004 nearly as a direct response to Kenseth’s points-driven 2003 Winston Cup title.) Around that same time, Logano and Brad Keselowski began their careers on the major circuit, taking the element of brashness brought by predecessors Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch and revving it up to 12 on scale of 1 to 10. “We were racing for the win and he blocks you a few times and then we raced hard and he blocked me the last time and we spun out”, Logano said.
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Hayley was third with Cole Custer fourth in the No. 00 Chevrolet and Tyler Reddick fifth in the No. 19 Ford.
