Jeff Burton was confused why his Richard Childress Racing teammate Kevin Harvick sounded off on the team radio and said Burton was "out of mulligans" as the two battled during Sunday's Martinsville race.
Jeff Burton To Kevin Harvick: The World Isn’t Out To Get You
Harvick apparently felt Burton was chopping and cutting him off in the turns as the two raced close to the front. Burton denied that and said he didn’t understand why Harvick was upset.
“There will come a point when he realizes that everybody in the world is not against him,” Burton said. “Every time there’s a conflict, he’s involved. And you would think over the amount of years he’s done it that he would get the hint that he’s always in the middle of it. Maybe sometimes if he just backed up a little bit and caught his breath, he’d be OK.
“I’m not out to harm him. I’m a teammate of his. I’m trying to help him. There comes a point where he’s got to catch his breath and realize that it’s my racetrack too, and I didn’t do anything wrong. And if he thinks I did anything wrong, then we can’t race. There’s nothing I did that I regret and there’s nothing I won’t do next week.”
Burton said he believed Harvick was just “wound up” about racing for a championship, because there was no way Harvick meant what he said.
"I can assure you I didn't do anything wrong and I'll do it again a thousand times," Burton said. "If what I did was wrong, then I'll just quit racing."
Harvick was more tight-lipped about the incident in his postrace news conference.
Asked about the hard racing, Harvick said, “I didn’t see any bent fenders or contact, so I think it was fine.”
When a reporter tried to follow up by asking about the big picture and perhaps not racing so hard with a teammate, Harvick responded curtly, “We were just racing.”
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