It's not even the first race of the season. It's a pre-season exhibition race: the Sprint Unlimited at Daytona International Speedway. Of course, we've already got Kevin Harvick confronting Joey Logano without taking his helmet off in pit road after the two exchanged hate-taps on track after the race.
With two laps to go, Joey Logano gave Kevin Harvick an aggressive push. Both cars were just behind race winner Matt Kenseth, but Logano's push was more forceful than your usual bump-draft and sent Harvick up to tap the wall.
Harvick ended up with a flat tire from the punt and an eleventh-place finish. Logano, meanwhile, ended up sixth, and maintained that he only intended to help Harvick out.
Here's the heated exchange between the two drivers:
"He just shoved me straight in the fence," Harvick radioed in. "I had a right front [tire] going down and now it's flat. He just shoved me all the way in the corner."
Meanwhile, Logano was a bit more blunt about his side of the story on his own radio. "Fuck him, I was trying to help him that motherfucker," he said in Television Bleepese.
Harvick was not happy about this little incident, so he confronted Logano after the race—both as the cars were coming in as well as in pit road. Naturally, Harvick didn't take off his helmet just in case things got more heated, but luckily others were there to make sure it didn't come to blows.
Harvick had this to say after exchanging words with Logano, as quoted by USA Today:
You can't just drive somebody straight in the corner into the fence. He kind of did the same thing to me at Talladega and I told him, 'The karma train is coming after you" and it bit him right in the ass. So you can't do that.
According to occasional Jalopnik contributor and NASCAR racer Parker Klingerman, part of the problem lies in the difficulty the current cars have in bump-drafting:
he cars themselves are faster and really hard to bump-draft compared to previous years' cars, which takes a bit of the "rubbin's racin'" part out of the series, as seen tonight. Bump too hard and you'll push someone into the wall.
Logano, on the other hand, doesn't have any sympathy for Harvick's flat tire and wall rub. "All-Star races like this don't mean anything unless you win," he told USA Today.
