'She flew off the handle': Dale Jr. dishes on dust-up with Danica
Dale Earnhardt Jr. continues to defend his role in Saturday night's incident at Kentucky Speedway where a bump from the No. 88 Chevrolet sent Danica Patrick's car into the wall and ruined her race on Lap 207 of 267.
Speaking on Tuesday's edition of his weekly podcast, "The Dale Jr. Download," NASCAR's most popular driver explained, as he did immediately after the race, that he did not mean to wreck Patrick but that a problem with his car's brakes resulted in the contact.
"We were sitting there running along pumping the brakes a lot," said Earnhardt, who finished 21st. "I had just let Danica go by and we went down the back straightaway and I'm pumping the brakes and I can't pump them all the way to the floor on the straightaway because you don't want to slow the car down while you're trying to accelerate. You're just pumping them trying to get the fluid up, trying to get the pedal up. Well, when we got to the corner and I mashed the brake, it went all way to the floor, and I let off the brakes, mashed it again to the floor.
"At this point I'm going to hit her. I let off again and mashed the brakes and it goes to the floor, and then I ran in the back of her. So I couldn't slow the car down. There was nothing I could do about it."
Earnhardt said the collision with Patrick kept his own car from hitting the wall, calling it "a silver lining."
As for the angry reaction of Patrick, who was an XFINITY Series driver from 2010-2012 for the JR Motorsports organization that Earnhardt co-owns, her former boss wasn't impressed.
"She flew off the handle, got pissed off, our spotters communicated and told her about the brakes, and she still ran into us on pit road for whatever damn reason," Earnhardt said on his podcast. "That just brings a lot of unwanted attention to both of us for all the wrong reasons.
"I've been there, I've done that, but knowing what I know now, you don't want to make a bad situation worse. That sucked, I couldn't do anything about it, and I hated it wrecked her car, because nobody wants to get wrecked out of the race."
Asked on Tuesday about whether he tried to mediate between Patrick and Earnhardt, Patrick's current team owner -- Tony Stewart -- demurred.
"I didn't need to get into the middle of anything," said Stewart, the co-owner of Stewart-Haas Racing. "It didn't have anything to do with me."
