Matt Kenseth feels road rage after Joey Logano incident

Matt Kenseth did a slow burn Friday afternoon.

He began his media availability at Talladega Superspeedway cool and breezy, joking that he didn’t know what the word “quintessential” meant as reporters kept peppering him with questions about his incident with Joey Logano last weekend.

But the casual smirk dissipated in minutes, replaced by genuine emotion.

“Yeah, some day he might mature a little bit,” he said, referring to Logano, “but, first of all, he should have stopped running his mouth and, No. 2, he’s lying when he said he didn’t do it on purpose because he lifted his tires off the ground offset to the left and he’s too good a race car driver to do that by accident.”

Kenseth and Logano had one of those Boys-Have-At-It moments last weekend in Kansas when Logano did the NASCAR bump-and-run to bounce Kenseth from the lead and quite possibly the Chase.

Logano won the race. Kenseth finished 14th, meaning he needs a win here Sunday afternoon to advance to another round of the Chase elimination postseason.

NASCAR chairman Brian France called it “quintessential NASCAR.” Kenseth probably called it something entirely different away from the probing questions.

“I did everything I was supposed to do,” Kenseth said. “I tried to get away. He [Logano] drove the car into the wall himself twice. I don’t know how you can possibly either block someone or put somebody into the wall when they’re not up alongside you. It’s pretty talented if you can do that when somebody’s four feet behind you.”

Countered Logano: “We both went for the same piece of real estate. We both went into that corner hard. ... There was only room for one.”

Kenseth is now 35 points out of the final transfer position, putting him in that must-win situation. He will try to make the best of it this weekend, carving pumpkins with his daughters on Saturday before facing the demands that await on Sunday.

The positive spin on this is that Talladega is always an indiscriminate beast, leading to the anything-can-happen scenario, which would include a bunch of drivers ahead of him going crash and boom.

“Everything we do here is a risk/risk proposition,” Brad Keselowski said.

Exactly.

The only Chase driver with no worries is Logano, who has two victories in this round and will advance to the next one. Everybody else is in peril. You never know.

Stuff happens. Chaos happens.

“I think Talladega is one of the more mentally draining races you have, so you’re really just trying to get focused down here,” Kenseth said. “It’s more of a mental race than a physical race obviously. ... You can’t do anything about last week. I’m just thinking about Talladega and trying to figure out how we can possibly get a win here.”

Perhaps it’s best to look at Kenseth as collateral damage, part of the wreckage of the Chase and the high anxiety at every turn. It’s exactly what NASCAR wanted.

“This is the strategy that we all thought was going to be different when you have this kind of format,” France said. “But it does reward aggressive racing at the end of the day.”

Great for business.

Very bad for Mr. Kenseth.