Kyle Petty isn’t siding with Joey Logano as his beef with Ty Gibbs rages on after The Clash at the Coliseum over the weekend.
NASCAR prefaced their campaign with the exhibition race on Saturday night, but you wouldn’t know the race didn’t pay any points by the reactions from some of the drivers. Specifically, Logano and Gibbs rekindled a rivalry that began last season, and it looks like isn’t going away anytime soon.
As the dust settled, Petty attempted to make sense of what we saw between the Team Penske wheelman and the young Joe Gibbs Racing driver, elaborating on why he doesn’t believe Logano has much of a leg to stand on.
“When in Hollywood, there’s got to be drama. We saw it, with Ty Gibbs and Joey Logano. How ’bout that? Ty Gibbs had a phenomenal race. Who saw that coming? Joey Logano, everybody saw that coming. You know he’s going to run up front. But the drama at the end of the race, standing on the lift gate. One guy that’s 6’2″, one guy that’s 5’2″. The visual of looking at those two guys argue with each other was amazing. But I love that. I love that,” Petty stated, via NASCAR.com. “This race, in the big picture of life, and in the big picture of the NASCAR season, means this. Means zero. It’s all about the money in the bank, baby. No points. Doesn’t move you anywhere. But these two guys have the passion to go out and get it done.
“We saw Ty move Joey up. Have we ever seen Joey move anybody up? Yeah, I think we have. So if you do it, you can’t complain about it. I’m sorry, you can’t complain about it. Old school drivers would do it to each other and never complain about it. These guys do it to each other, and whine about and tweet about and put it up on Instagram, and put it up on Tik Tok. The world has to know somebody did something wrong to me. It wasn’t wrong what Ty Gibbs did. Not wrong.”
Petty has a point, as Logano has been one of the more aggressive drivers in the sport over his career in NASCAR. Still, it’s evident something Gibbs did last season sticks in his craw, and he has no love for the Joe Gibbs Racing youngster on the track.
Time will tell if these two are able to work out their differences before the Daytona 500, but it doesn’t seem likely. Don’t expect Joey Logano and Ty Gibbs to push each other to victory in The Great American Race when it rolls around.
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