CONCORD, N.C. – It wasn’t quite the slam-bang action of a vintage NASCAR All-Star Race, but there was one memorable moment of retaliation Saturday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Racing for a top-five position late in the race, Kyle Larson’s No. 42 Chevrolet squeezed Joey Logano’s No. 22 Ford into the wall off Turn 4.
After slapping the concrete, Logano came down the track and tagged Larson’s car in the right rear, causing the event’s final caution as Larson spun through the frontstretch grass.
Larson wasn’t upset, taking the blame after finishing seventh and rebounding from one of only two multicar incidents over the 93-lap event.
“Yeah,” the Chip Ganassi Racing driver told NBCSports.com with a smile when asked if he felt it was payback by Logano. “I didn’t mean to run him into the fence. I was trying to stay clear of him on exit. I got really tight because I tried to carry a lot of throttle through there and just stay in front of him.
“I tried to bail to leave him a lane but kind of shoved him up in the wall. He’s got a fairly short temper. He took it out on me. Thankfully, it’s not a points race or anything like that. I put myself in that spot. Obviously, you don’t want to be crashed on purpose, but I felt like I put myself in that spot a little bit.”
Asked whether the contact was intentional, Logano somewhat demurred but clearly felt Larson deserved the result.
“He fenced me, then I bounced off the wall, then there he was,” Logano said. “After he fenced me, I bounced off. He happened to be there. Probably shouldn’t have fenced me.”
The Team Penske driver hung on for third after the incident, delivering a critical bump to winner Kevin Harvick that helped push him past runner-up Daniel Suarez on the final restart.
“Kevin and I always end up together at superspeedway races, and we did again tonight, which is kind of funny,” he said. “I didn’t have quite a good enough run to go three-wide, and if I did, the bottom lane would have gone by both of us, and there would have been no gain for any of us. We wouldn’t have won anyway.
“My only shot was to push (Harvick) ahead and try to clear (Suarez), which I couldn’t. It was a hard-fought night. You can tell by the right side of my car that it was hard fought. It was crazy.”