Matt Kenseth on Brad Keselowski fight: ‘I don’t regret my actions’

A week after their scuffle in the Charlotte Motor Speedway garage, Matt Kenseth and Brad Keselowski agreed to disagree about what led to their encounter.

Kenseth contends Keselowski intentionally drove him into the wall following a restart with 63 laps remaining last Saturday. The damage caused Kenseth to drop out of the top five and into a 19th-place finish, which moved him a position out of advancing in the Chase for the Sprint Cup with one Round 2 race to go.

An upset Kenseth swerved into Keselowski under caution with six laps remaining. A maneuver Kenseth admits to, but says caused no damage to the No. 2 car.

“Brad clearly saw me roll outside of him,” Kenseth said Friday at Talladega Superspeedway. “He hung a right on purpose and ran me right into the wall and ruined my night and possibly took us out of Chase contention.

“If you watch video you can see he had no marks on his right front of his car after that. He said it tore his whole right front off. I did indeed swerve at him when I took the wave around because I was mad he put me in the wall and totally ruined my day, but if you look at his car there is absolutely no damage on it. That was just him greatly exaggerating the story.”

Keselowski disputes Kenseth’s account.

“He is always entitled to his opinion, as I am to mine,” Keselowski said. “Obviously, we have a difference of them or what happened Saturday wouldn’t have happened.”

After two incidents on the track, Keselowski expressed his displeasure with Kenseth by hitting the No. 20 car on pit road following the Bank of America 500. He then careened into Tony Stewart, who proceeded to deliberately back into Keselowski. Keselowski called it “unfortunate” Stewart was involved.

The tempers carried over to the garage. Walking down an alley between two haulers Keselowski was accosted by Kenseth from behind. The incident set off a skirmish between their two teams with Kenseth briefly placing Keselowski in a headlock before Paul Wolfe, Keselowski’s crew chief, separated them.

NASCAR fined Keselowski $50,000 and Stewart $25,000 for intentional contact on pit road Tuesday. Kenseth was not sanctioned.

“Pulling those high school stunts playing car wars after the race was just absolutely unacceptable,” Kenseth said. “That definitely put me over the edge. I don’t regret my actions. I’m not proud of them or happy about them or any of that, but I don’t regret them. I don’t know that I would do anything different if the same thing went down again.

“You never want to get into confrontations, at least I don’t. I like to avoid them. I’m definitely not built for fighting and it’s not really in my genes, but I guess everybody has their breaking point.”

While Kenseth said he had no regrets, Keselowski wouldn’t disclose whether he had any remorse.

“I am not really ready to get into that side of it,” Keselowski said. “I haven’t put a lot of thought into it to be honest.

“I am not going to say I haven’t spent any time on it, but I didn’t spend enough to really have all my thoughts and feelings put together enough to share it with [the media.]”