NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France has taken a ‘let the boys go at it’ attitude to the post-race fight between Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and team personnel at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway yesterday.
While the melee gathered world-wide attention, France said that the sport’s sanctioning body was ‘not going to get too wound up about’ the incident.
Logano and Busch came into contact on the last lap of the Kobalt 400 which resulted in Busch’s #18 Toyota spinning towards pit road, while Logano continued on to finish fourth.
France’s comments go hand in hand with comments from former Australian touring car ace Tony Longhurst who told Speedcafe.com yesterday that the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship needs more NASCAR style emotion.
“Listen, it’s an emotional sport as you know,” France told SiriusXM.
“There’s so much on the line for all these drivers and teams.
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“So much is expected of these guys to do their thing, so when things happen that are going to happen at a race, it’s not terribly crazy to understand that emotions are going to blow over sometimes, and we get that.”
While NASCAR is unlikely to take any action, France was keen to point out that he was not keen to see any future on-track retaliation between Logano and Busch.
“My guess is that Kyle and Joey will sort that out and there really won’t be anything we need to worry about down the road,” France said.
“If there is, we’ll deal with it. We’ll look at the tape and look at the crewmember participation and different things, but we also want to be realistic.
“There is just a lot of emotion and a lot of pressure on these guys to do well and compete at a high level.
“And when something goes terribly wrong, as it did for Kyle, emotions are going to get the best of all of us at some point or another. Obviously, that’s what happened on Sunday.”
NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer, Steve O’Donnell, said that the post-race incident is under review, but hinted at no further action being taken.
“It’s certainly under review,” O’Donnell told SirusXM.
“We have to take everything, make sure we look at all the video, but just from our in assessment last night, as far as on-track I don’t think we saw anything that was intentional by any means.
“We have to have discussions with both drivers. I think our intention would be not to react unless we see something we haven’t seen yet.
“It’s an emotional sport and I think it shows exactly how much every position on the track means.”
The next round of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series will be at Phoenix International Raceway this weekend.
VIDEO: Brian France speaks about the fight
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