NASCAR Cup Series

Carl vs. Brad feud hurts other teams

Published Jul. 21, 2010 1:00 a.m. ET

Larry McReynolds

What we saw happen Saturday night in the Nationwide Series race was pretty bizarre.

Now I have a lot of opinions and viewpoints on all of it. So after Saturday night do I think this thing between Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski is over? Absolutely not.

I actually thought it was over after what happened in the Sprint Cup race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, when Edwards spun Keselowski‘s car. For the most part, it really had gone away. Obviously, as Edwards spun out Keselowski on the final lap in the Nationwide race, it has cropped up again.

If you rob a bank of $100 or you rob a bank of $100,000, sure it’s a significant difference, but you still committed a crime. Do both these boys have a long history of things like this? Again, absolutely, and not just with each other. There’s a very long list of people Carl has had run-ins with, including a teammate a few years ago. Brad also has a long list.

Do I think this is what NASCAR had in mind when they said, “Have at it, boys?” Absolutely not. Now, do I think NASCAR will do something about it? I don’t. I don’t think it will and I don’t think it should. I still believe this is something that drivers have to monitor and govern themselves.

Now, here is the thing I shake my fist at. Both these guys are Cup drivers running the full Nationwide season. These two look like they are going to battle for the championship. But these guys are playing grab-ass with each other on the white-flag lap and one gets wrecked out.

The bigger victims are those full-time Nationwide drivers, some who are trying to make a name for themselves and get a good finish. A lot of innocent people and their equipment got torn up and that’s what I don’t like.

This is once again what I don’t like about retaliation with race cars. You hear me preach it all the time. I also still have a bigger problem with what Carl did at Atlanta than what he did Saturday night. Atlanta was premeditated. He was wrecked, but had his team fix the car enough to get him back on the track specifically to wreck out Brad.

Does wrecking a guy out of race really penalize the driver? Not really. It’s the guys back in the shop that now have to shoulder the burden of either fixing or building a new car because you just wrecked. Look at poor Shelby Howard. That bunch is operating on a shoe-string budget. Now they have a wrecked race car through no fault of their own because these two Cup guys can’t settle their differences off the race track. That’s the part of this whole deal that is so disappointing.

At some point this has to come to a head. Is this good for the sport? It’s already beyond that. A little rivalry, a little feud, a little getting back at each other is definitely good for the sport. What these guys are doing now is not good for it. Is Brad a saint in this whole deal? Absolutely not, but Carl just stepped too far across the line again.

There are two people, and only two people, who can fix this. Those guys are team owners Roger Penske (Keselowski) and Jack Roush (Edwards). They need to sit these drivers down and tell them enough is enough. Somewhere we have stepped across the line of what is good for the sport. Listening to the race fans, a lot of them feel the same way. It was cool at first because of the rivalry, but now we are beyond that.

Now let’s be realistic. Dale Earnhardt did this for years. The difference back then was we didn’t have all the coverage and social media like today, so nobody thought twice about it. I watched him wreck Terry Labonte so many times at Bristol that you can’t even count them all.

Ask Darrell Waltrip. Dale wrecked him and a host of others, including himself, on the last lap at Richmond trying to get back at Darrell. Out of nowhere, Kyle Petty ends up winning that race. DW will tell you that it was one of the hardest hits he ever took. For that matter, one other bad hit he took was in the all-star race when Dale wrecked them both.

My point is this is not something new, but now it’s starting to involve a lot of innocent people and that’s what I don’t like about it. Like I keep saying, if you want to park that race car, get out and flail the living hell out of each other, I will cheer and applaud. Just keep the race cars out of it.