BRISTOL, Tenn. — All’s well that ends well in the case of NASCAR Cup Series title contenders Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney — for now.
The pair of past champions had a nefarious encounter last weekend at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway as the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports driver spun Blaney in Turns 3 and 4 on Lap 135. While Blaney was furious over the radio in the moment, he and Larson had a cordial exchange on pit road after the race as the No. 12 Team Penske Ford rallied for a top-five while Larson placed 12th.
A week removed and an elimination race to focus on at Bristol Motor Speedway Saturday night (7:30 ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App), there appear to be no leftover feelings about the incident.
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“I’ve always been someone who doesn’t hold a ton of grudge,” Blaney said Friday at Bristol. “I’ve found it more healthy for me to get it out of my system right away, and then I can move on. If I hold it in, then I think about it for a long time and then that’s how things can kind of build and all that stuff. That’s just kind of how I’ve approached it. Just to have a conversation like we had last week is really all I was searching for. I think you get a lot more done having an adult conversation with somebody. Granted, if I felt like it was malicious, then maybe it’s a different conversation. But I don’t think it was. It was just a mistake of two guys running hard and I got the bad end of it.”
Larson said as much earlier in the week about the incident during a Zoom teleconference.
“We all have those moments,” Larson said Wednesday. “Every move we make throughout every corner of the race is strategical. I wouldn’t necessarily say that anybody races much different than anybody these days. We’re pushing hard. It’s coming to the end of the stage. I had made a move the lap before, which is exactly what I was trying to do that lap and it was just further back than I was lap before. I entered faster to get there, and then I wasn’t going to get there. I was just trying to get back in line and just misjudged where his left-rear corner of the car was by a foot or so.”
While Blaney could very well retaliate on track or after a race, it’s not in his blood and said that he’s a ‘spitting image’ of his father, Dave, in that they are soft spoken when the helmets are off, but in the heat of the moment, they both get really competitive because they want to win each weekend.
Instead of rubbing fenders or fisticuffs, Blaney prefers another way of getting back at those who wronged him on track.
“I would rather go out and if I feel like someone did me wrong or someone made a mistake around me, I think the biggest statement you can do is just go kick their ass the next week and like the rest of the year and do it in the right way,” Blaney said. “I don’t need to rough you up to beat you. I’m gonna beat you straight up and I think that’s the biggest statement that you can make and that’s just kind of how I always think.”
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