Denny Hamlin believes that Joey Logano was trying to “scare” Ty Gibbs when he confronted him at his hauler following the conclusion of Saturday’s Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum.
Logano walked up to Gibbs after the race, heated at the way the Joe Gibbs Racing youngster raced him during the exhibition. The 21-year-old led a race-high 84 laps but made a costly error on the penultimate restart. Gibbs lined up next to Logano and washed high from the center of Turns 1 and 2. He nearly ran Logano into the wall, allowing Hamlin to go low and take the lead. Hamlin, Gibbs’ teammate, went onto win the race.
“Ty was saying, ‘Hey, come on in the hauler. Let’s do this privately.’ And Joey did not want to do it,” Hamlin said on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast. “He wanted to do it right there on the lift gate. And so that opened it up a little bit more. Do I think this was kind of a scare you tactic? Yeah, probably. I just think that Ty wasn’t going to take any s***. And you kinda heard it from his reaction. Like, ‘So what? Go for it.’
“And that’s just a dangerous game to play on both sides. Right? Because your season hasn’t even started, and you got two guys that are angry at each other. Again, when both of them are just fine wrecking each other, that’s not going to be good for either one. So, they gotta get it worked out somehow. My advice, I actually said to Ty was to be the first one to extend the olive branch. If he doesn’t pay back that, it’s free game.”
Logano and Gibbs have prior history. In this past October’s race at Martinsville Speedway, Logano spun Gibbs around. This time, the two-time Cup Series wanted to have a chat, but refused to join Gibbs in his hauler, away from the cameras.
Joey Logano explains his frustration with Ty Gibbs
Logano, speaking on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio this week, said he wanted to make sure Gibbs knew he was upset and that what he did was unacceptable.
“So, I was open … I’ve been through this before,” Logano said. “Let me see if I can help the situation out. So, we left, and we shook hands and ‘OK, here is how we’re going to do it, we’re going to respect each other on the racetrack, we’re going to respect each other. And only for the first opportunity for us to race each other since that conversation to get completely used up on the restart. I get it, 10 laps to go in the Clash and we’re going to be aggressive with each other, but to completely use me up into the fence, not going to be OK with me.
“So, obviously, I’m mad about that. At that point, I wanted to make sure he knew that I was pretty upset about that and that’s not acceptable. Now, where do we go from here? I don’t know. I don’t know. We had a conversation, he said all the right things. His words don’t mean nothing to me anymore, so I’m not going to talk to him. But I don’t really know the next to do. … I’m at a loss at this point.”