Matt Kenseth says he and Jeff
Gordon talked earlier this week about their collision near the end of last Sunday's race at Chicagoland Speedway, but the
Roush Racing driver hasn't changed his stance on the accident.
The pair were battling for
the lead when Gordon tagged Kenseth and Kenseth - leading at the time - spun. Gordon went on to win, and Kenseth, who
also ran out of gas heading
to a pit stop and then was hit again on the final lap, settled for 22nd.
"He came and talked to
me after the test [at Indianapolis Motor Speedway] on Tuesday, so I talked to him a little bit," Kenseth said Friday morning
at New Hampshire International Speedway prior to practice for Sunday's Lenox Industrial Tools 300.
Asked if, after reviewing the
incident, he still felt it was intentional, Kenseth said, "Oh, yeah."
Kenseth briefly recounted the
conversation, saying that Gordon didn't deny intent in the contact.
"He basically told me in so
many words that he didn't mean to spin me out. But did he mean to hit me? Yeah," Kenseth said. "Did he mean to hit me that
hard? No. So I guess he was upset on that restart."
On the restart prior to the
caution, Kenseth moved over to keep Gordon from completing a pass.
"I kind of blocked him, which,
he was hanging back more than a car length, which is actually technically a rule - they tell us every drivers meeting, if
you hang back more than a car length, you're going to be black-flagged and, to my knowledge, nobody has ever been even told
about it or black-flagged or anything - so I had to block my restart because I felt like he hung way back, and I knew I could
get away in a couple of laps, and I thought that was kind of a cheap way to pass somebody, by holding back, which a lot of
people do because they never enforce it."
Kenseth also felt Gordon carried
lingering feelings from their incident at Bristol Motor Speedway in April when Kenseth pushed Gordon out of the way as he
moved up to third.
"And he was mad because he
got taken out at Bristol, which I thought was a little different - he moved me out of the way to start with, and it was the
last lap and he blocked me on the frontstretch, and I was right on him trying to get underneath him and barely touched his
car, and he spun out on a half-mile track. So he told me he wasn't going to cut me a break, and he was going to get up on
me and try to move me up the track and move me out of the way, which I guess that's what happened.
"I don't know that he meant
to spin me out, but yet I've never been ran into or ran into somebody at a mile-and-a-half race track somewhere that fast,
180 miles an hour, and not spun out. I've never seen somebody knock somebody out of the way at a mile-and-a-half track and
not wreck, so I guess that's about the summary."
Asked where things now stood
between himself and Gordon, Kenseth said he wasn't sure.
"I don't know. I don't
think we're going to be going to dinner tonight," he said. "We talked about after Indy, but honestly when we talked about
it, it was kind of one of them things where he came over and apologized but wasn't very apologetic, if you know what I mean.
He almost acted like he was mad at me. I don't know."
