CUP: RCR Boys Have At It

Sprint Cup

CUP: RCR Boys Have At It

There were hard feelings between RCR teammates on Sunday...

Tom Jensen | Posted October 24, 2010 Martinsville, VA

Jeff Burton finished 9th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series TUMS Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway. (Photo: Getty Images)

You expect hard racing and harder feelings whenever the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races at the tiny and claustrophobic 0.526-mile paperclip known as Martinsville Speedway. You just don’t expect it to be among teammates, especially with a NASCAR Sprint Cup championship at stake.

But that’s what happened in Sunday’s Tums Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville, where Richard Childress Racing teammates Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton went after it hammer-and-tongs in mid-race.

Between them, Harvick and Burton led more than half the laps at Martinsville, with Harvick finishing third behind race-winner Denny Hamlin and the ageless Mark Martin. Burton, meanwhile, led a race-high 134 laps before a bad set of tires on the last run dropped him to ninth in the final rundown.

What got tongues wagging, though, was the fight between the two on track. Harvick gave Burton a couple of hard shots after he accused Burton of chopping down across his nose, something Harvick said over his radio had happened before.

After the race, Harvick had little to say about the incidents between the two. “I didn't see any bent fenders or contact, so I think it was fine,” said Harvick, who is third in points, 62 behind leader Jimmie Johnson.

Queried on the topic a second time, he added, “We were just racing.”

Burton, on the other hand, was hopping mad and pretty blunt about how he felt.

“I don’t understand what he is mad at,” Burton said of Harvick. “I cleared him on the front straightaway and beat him off Turn 4 and cleared him on the front straightaway and turned to the bottom. The same thing he did to me on the restart is the same thing that happens every restart at Martinsville. It’s just Martinsville.”

From there, Burton was just getting warmed up.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said flatly. “I think he is just wound up and racing for a championship and just ... I don’t know. I can assure you I didn’t do anything wrong and I would do it again a thousand times. Because if what I did was wrong, then I will just quit racing.”

And he suggested that Harvick might have been a little too self-absorbed to accurately assess what happened.

“There will come a point when he realizes that everybody in the world is not against him,” Burton said. “And every time it’s a conflict he is involved. And you would think over the amount of years that he has done it, that he would get the hint that he is always in the middle of it and maybe sometimes if he just backed up a little bit and caught his breath, he would be okay.

“I’m not out to harm him,” Burton said. “I am a teammate of his and I am trying to help him and there comes a point where he needs to just catch his breath and realize that it’s my racetrack, too. And I didn’t do anything wrong. If he thinks I did anything wrong, then we can’t race and there is nothing that I did that I regret and there is nothing I won’t do next week.”

Harvick at least could walk away with the dual consolations of a career-best Martinsville finish, along with being solidly in championship contention, something eighth-place Burton isn’t any more.

“Coming into this race, no one gave us a chance to even run anywhere towards the front,” said Harvick. “So it's nice to come here, get the finishes we feel like we deserve, that we've run well over the last few years, just hadn't got the finishes to show for it. Great day for us.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Jensen

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