Matt Kenseth Suspended For Two Races After Deliberately Hitting

I’m one of the only guys that I think hasn’t been into yet with Joey and I’ve always raced him with a ton of respect, I’ve actually been one of his biggest fans.

Instead, Logano finished 37th and will likely need to win one of the next two races at Texas or Phoenix in order to advance to the championship round.

So Kenseth threw a block on Logano’s attempt to pass him for the win. That being said as far as NASCAR is concern it couldn’t have gone any better. But I’ll be surprised if they sit him out and I don’t think they should. NASCAR wanted to paint the image that the drivers of today are still the rugged bad-boy drivers of the past.

“It was disappointing to us that a driver who was not competing for a win, many laps down, did something like that”. On Sunday, he deliberately crashed into Logano at Martinsville and Logano lost a shot at an automatic berth in the final four.

“This is total BS right here”, echoed Kyle Petty, an analyst with NBC Sports.

He even engages sponsors – AARP’s Drive to End Hunger, for instance – that are all about social causes, and not trying to sell you a six-pack of beer.

NASCAR announced the penalty late Tuesday afternoon. I’ll tell it to you straight, if NASCAR doesn’t drop the hammer on Matt Kenseth, well – shame on them. Most NASCAR “experts” seem disgusted with what Kenseth did. The teammates had been working together on restarts, strategy that angered other drivers who believed the Penske drivers were monkeying around. It is not okay to do what Kenseth did to Logano last Sunday, however. Logano was already locked in to the next round and he was being greedy. “I’ve been in this business a long time, I feel I’ve had a pretty good career to this point and I feel like I’m going to continue to have the respect on the race track that I feel I deserve”.

Matt Kenseth had his take, too.

Kenseth has been suspended for the next two races for intentionally wrecking Joey Logano in Sunday’s race at Martinsville. What did Logano expect Kenseth to do?

It isn’t that Logano spun Kenseth that shows something about Logano’s mettle, rather it’s the shoulder-shrug position he took after the fact. It’s thought to be the first time in the modern era that a driver has been parked for multiple Sprint Cup races for an on-track incident, and will bring to an end the 43-year-old’s streak of 571 consecutive starts which is second only to Jeff Gordon among now active drivers. At the time of the Martinsville incident Kenseth was inside the top five and right on the heels of Logano. Kevin Harvick and Brad Keselowski are racing.

Now the next question, what punishment should Kenseth receive, if any? The issue at hand is that NASCAR is now penalizing Kenseth for using the system in which they created.

A few drivers took to social media following Sunday’s race both to call out NASCAR’s inconsistency on calls of this type and to say the series needs to reign in the “wild West” mentality. “Sure, when people crown the statement that a driver’s doing what he’s got to do and they became OK with that statement, you’re just opening up Pandora’s box”.

“I wish I would have handled it differently”, Gordon said. Joe Gibbs Racing will argue it’s very inconsistent. Now JGR is not hurting financially but who wants to give away money.

I have no problem if NASCAR wants to crackdown on paybacks, it’s there sport, they can do what they want. And how entertaining would it be if Logano and Kenseth qualify side by side at Texas?

“I ain’t going to argue with what Matt did, Matt felt like he was justified with how Joey wrecked him at Kansas and then was arrogant about it afterward”, said Dale Earnhardt Jr.